Croatian National Theatre

Situation

The previous theatre web site had multiple deficiencies. Content structure and organization made use complicated. The absence of a robust CMS made it difficult to enter a variety of content types.

The visual solution was out of date and did not meet users needs. Additionally, multimedia content presentation was suboptimal, preventing polished presentation of potentially valuable content.

No search engine optimization made it hard for quality content to surface in search engine result lists.

The goals for the new web site were:

• Improve the information architecture of the web site so that visitors with different interests could easily find their way
• Create a modern design based on th existing visual identity of the theatre's printed materials
• Make it simple for multiple editors with different access privileges to manage multilingual content
• Allow a high quality presentation of the available rich multimedia content
• Improve the search engine page rank

Solution

The new web site was built on eZ Publish CMS. The visual solution was evolved from existing printed materials, adapted to a different medium.

The site's organization was rethought and revised to ease access to different types of content. The majority of the content has been grouped into art form related categories (opera, drama, ballet), and it has been made possible to mix different types of content (news, plays, multimedia) to integrate and better present the content. The guiding idea of the site's reconstructioin was the visitor and the visitor's ease of navigating the content.

The web site is kept up to date by time-dependent elements on the site's front page and front pages of individual art forms: the ever important performance schedule is present on the main home page and lists all performances, while the individual art form front pages display performance schedules containing only performances in their own art forms. Additionally, a major part of the front page is dedicated to the newest plays of each art form, displayed in an interactive visual element.

Multimedia is used intensively with all content on the web site, making it easy to link all content (plays, news, articles) with video clips, audio clips and photos. A special eZ Publish extension has been developed to feed video and audio clips to a flash component directly from the site's administration interface. Being able to use a single interface to handle all aspects of the web site's management reduces the time and effort necessary to educate end users and makes the task easier.

The use of valid HTML tags coupled with eZ Publish SEO capabilities, great results were achieved with regard to the site's visibility in search engine results.

• Client-specific contant class development
• Design of the site's information architecture
• Multilingual content support
• Multimedia flash elements integrated with the CMS
• Search engine optimization (SEO)

Technologies

The entire web site is implemented on the eZ Publish CMS. Flash and JavaScript (the jQuery framework) were used to implement interactive elements.

• eZ publish CMS
• PHP, MySQL
• FlashJavaScript / jQuery framework
• XHTML, CSS

Results

The new HNK Zagreb web site fulfilled all the requirements put before them. Content administration has been radically simplified, but is at the same time more powerful, allowing management of various content types. The immediate result is that content is updated more frequently, it is richer and it's quality is higher.

User reactions suggested a significant improvement when compared to the previous solution, with the web site frequently being described as the best in it's class.

eZ Publish has been recognized by the client as a strategic platform for HNK's future presence on the Internet. The Enterprise Open Source strategy, based on the advantages of an open source solution and enriched by both eZ Systems and Netgen as the Silver partner in Croatia, ensures the protection of the time and effort already invested into the web site.