Venues Today New Website Launched

In today’s fast-paced electronic age, offering up a stagnant website is akin to U2 putting on a show with no encore.

Venues such as arenas, stadiums, performing arts centers and convention centers especially need to be forward-thinking with today’s digital marketing solutions.

Like many companies, Venues Today was a victim of the ever-changing technology. The company serves as a leading source of news and information for live entertainment and events, serving management, owners and suppliers to music, sports and meetings venues internationally with its monthly magazine, weekly e-newsletter and resource guides.

Its website was severely hindering Venues Today’s mission to share news and how-to information with all sectors of the live sports, entertainment and meetings industry.
“We desperately needed to update our website,” says Linda Deckard, Venues Today’s publisher and editor-in-chief. “In the past, we used designers who weren’t vested in our site.”

As a result, the website’s design and functionality would too quickly become outdated.
“We had a very static website where we couldn’t add any content, share news stories or really do much with it,” says Dave Brooks, Venues Today’s senior writer and assignment editor.

Where much of its website content is given away, some aspects of the site contain protected content that is exclusive for subscribers.

Bottom line, Venues Today needed a functional, more attractive site that carried a consistent look with its publications. Its staff was in dire need of a more modern program that allowed them to easily share time-sensitive news and features on demand, while pushing out information through an RSS feed that was uncomplicated to subscribe to. Facilitating article sharing on Facebook and Twitter also was important. In addition, a straightforward program was needed to add high resolution photos, videos and podcast links to the site.

“We had been using a program for our website and you practically needed a software engineering degree to get it to work,” Brooks says. “It was confusing, always crashing and had a lot of glitches. And we had to utilize it every day."

The Venues Today team knew it was time for an update and needed a digital marketing solutions company that understood venues to lead the way. The solution was obvious.
“We had been in talks with carbonhouse for some time and knew they were the leader in venue website development,” Brooks says. “They are the standard, we wanted the best and there was no question that they could pull it off.”

Even though the company is not a venue, Venues Today’s clientele is the same as carbonhouse’s. Just like the merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster, the collaboration made sense.

carbonhouse got Venues Today back in the game by rebuilding its website from the ground up. When the site went live in June 2011, the publishing company instantly became a state-of-the-art news organization.
“It was a 180-degree turn from our old site,” Brooks says.

While the old program reached out to a limited number of people and had severe e-mail deficiencies, Venues Today can now share up-to-the-minute news and features articles with anyone at any time on demand.
The publishing company is able to tell its story in a consistent way, since all of the necessary elements are now in place. Articles are easily searchable and accessible to website visitors. The new design dramatically showcases venue photos, serving as a huge canvas.

One of the biggest benefits is the simplicity of the behind-the-scenes web program. Venues Today is utilizing carbonhouse’s proprietary greenhouse web-based content management system to access its content anytime and anywhere. With this program, expert and novice staff can add, edit, expand and delete website content and information quickly and easily. Photos can be dropped in, content can be changed, calendars can be updated, logos can be altered and press releases can be sent in an instant.
“We use greenhouse every single day, and it is very easy to use,” Brooks says. “It is extremely intuitive and clearly laid out. Best of all, it works seamlessly and is easy to learn.”

After only one month of going live, Venues Today experienced what concert-goers typically dread--a dramatic increase in traffic, albeit on its website. We’re talking double-digit growth.

“We were able to post our photos from the IAVM conference up on our site right away, along with articles that targeted conference attendees,” Brooks says. “This pushed our traffic really high and has helped drive more people to our site. Story views have skyrocketed.”

By working with carbonhouse, Venues Today not only gained an updated, attractive and functional website, but created buzz and added exposure for the company. In the sports, event and entertainment business, there is nothing better. 

“carbonhouse knows the industry we cover and our target market,” Deckard says. “They are on call for us and available for anything we need. The consistency and constant availability of carbonhouse’s technological expertise has been a big benefit to me as a business owner.”