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Theatre on the Web in 2000: Companies and SummarySites for Companies As a general rule, sites for theatre companies are the most adventurous. Many use the latest technology - the number of theatre company sites which require the visitor to have Flash is increasing every day - but sometimes this actually gets in the way. It can take a devil of a long time for a Flash site to load over a V.90 connection and surfers are not noted for their patience! Those surfers with an interest in theatre are probably more patient than most, but waiting a few minutes on a metered connection is too much. Admittedly such sites are much faster once they are loaded, but sitting for minutes looking at a screen which simply says "Loading: please wait" is not my favourite pastime, and I suspect many others feel the same way! It seems to me that the majority of theatre companies which go online do so because they want to, because they feel it is valuable, because it is a way of reaching a much larger audience than their very limited (if any) marketing budgets can afford. Quite a few try to establish a rapport with their audience, offering the chance to communicate with the company through email lists or even bulletin boards. Photographs of productions are a common feature. Most sites list their sponsors and give a potted history of the company. Summary Site design has continued to improve during the past year. There are still some badly designed sites, but they tend to be among the actor/actress fan sites. One weakness which is still apparent in sites of all kinds it the lack of internal navigation, with the user having to use the [BACK] button on his/her browser, although some sites now do put a link to the main page. A few sites try to force you to follow a particular path through the site by putting Next and Previous links on each page. Whilst one can understand why a site's author might want this, it isn't really in keeping with the spirit of what the Web is all about - rapid access to the information you need. Fames are considerably less common than they used to be. Personally I think this is a good thing, for numerous reasons:
Quite a few sites now have their own "mini" search engines, which is a valuable addition to the site for the visitor in a hurry. In fact, this kind of "add-on" is becoming more and more common generally. More and more sites have bulletin boards, chat rooms and even list-servers for email newsletters, in addition to the ubiquitous and long-established Guest Books. These do add a sense of community to the site, but authors should be careful. An active bulletin board is a big plus for a site, but one on which the only message is something from the Webmaster inviting contributions (unless, of course, dated very recently) is positively off-putting. The World Wide Web is not yet the major source of British theatre information that it could be, but it is nearer to being so than it was twelve months ago, and there is certainly no comparison between what is on offer now and what was available when the About British Theatre site went live in April 1997. I have noticed recently a slowing-down in the appearance of new sites and of course, as always, existing sites do vanish. It is pleasing to report, however, that the sites which do vanish tend to be the least useful - one might almost call them the poorest. Some good sites do disappear, of course, and this is a shame, but it is the nature of the Web to be constantly changing. Who knows what 2001 will bring? I'm not going to risk a guess! By the way, the omission from this survey of sites for amateur theatre is deliberate. I shall be taking my annual look at amateur theatre sites a little later in the year. Page 1, 2, 3 Articles Indices: |
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