Abbey Box Office
Abbey Box Office has been selling theatre tickets for over 50 years and is a founding member of the Society of Ticket Agents and Retailers (STAR). We launched Abbey’s first website in 2004 and this October redesigned the site and its functionality.
What Abbey Box Office needed
Abbey Box Office needed an attractive, professional looking website with a user-friendly checkout procedure to improve customer perception, industry respect, user journeys and sales. The design needed to be highly usable but with a real wow factor; embodying the excitement of London theatre. Behind the scenes the site had to efficiently integrate with Abbey Box Office’s ticketing database THEBS to provide real-time ticket availability.
What the OTHER media did
A streamlined shopping process was central to improving customer journeys and revenue, with customers reaching checkout in just two clicks. The homepage in particular gives relevant information in a hierarchical way, with top show, top seller, our picks and special offers assisting customer decision making. Show pages display performance-availability in a visual and accessible way, with keyphrase-rich text furthering SEO and complementing a successful PPC campaign.
Technical innovation
For Abbey Box Office’s new site we undertook a great deal of Research and Development to ensure that we used the latest in technological innovation. YUI (Yahoo User Interface), DED chain, powerful predictive text searches and reflections are all utilized across the site to assist the user and create an extremely visual experience. AJAX is used to create the ticketing information and payment page overlays, allowing for in-screen browsing and payment.
The results
Abbey Box Office now has a distinctive looking, industry-leading website. The new copy across the site has improved Abbey’s search position by an average of three search results pages across all shows; this is coupled with a proven PPC campaign. Revenue and visitor numbers are projected to improve each quarter, whilst improved usability and a streamlined shopping process make for an exception user experience.
