Minnesota Youth Symphonies
As the Minnesota Youth Symphonies approached its 35th anniversary, its leaders knew it needed a new website.
With three full orchestras and over 400 K-12 student musicians participating each year, the organization needed its site to do more of the work of letting audiences and potential students know about performances and rehearsals. As well as taking financial donations, the site also needed to sell tickets to concerts. And what concert organization’s site would be complete without recordings of the beautiful music?
After developing a newly refined logo, MYS staff came to Triangle Park Creative to redesign the site. Designer Shelly Dahn worked with MYS’s brand attributes to create a modular design, expanding a limited color palette and introducing visual elements that resulted in a design that emphasizes the organization’s role as an institution in the youth performance field.
The new site also needed to be much easier to update and keep current. With a constantly changing list of rehearsals, retreats, and performances, the site had to reflect impending events, or it would just frustrate its users. Based on the open-source Drupal content management system, the site now allows staff with different levels of permission to enter, edit or approve copy.
A key piece the site needed was a flexible calendar. Users can see all events or select just one type of event, such as classes, concerts or auditions. If potential student musicians find an audition on the calendar, they can click on it to get a description, sign up online, and get information on how to prepare.
Triangle Park’s web programmers also worked with MYS to establish a payment system, with a shopping cart for ticket payments and donations, and its own payment gateway for secure transactions.
We also enabled the site to create forms on the fly — so if MYS needs the site to ask alumni who visit the site what they’ve been up to, MYS staff can create a form and put it on the website without requiring outside programming help.
All in all, the new site reflects the Symphonies’ sophistication as both an organization and a group of musicians.