Welcome to CATCO’s new, improved website! As directors are fond of telling actors, it’s “Bigger! Faster! Funnier!”
It’s been at least eight years since the last major overhaul and a lot of the information on the site has become outdated. The website itself was never simple to use: I sometimes wished I had a GPS device to find what I was looking for. And as my teenaged daughter commented, the site was “lame.”
So we’re really happy to launch a new website, together with a new logo and tagline for CATCO.
Managing Director T.J. Gerckens has been working for almost a year with our board committee on branding and with the marketing department at CAPA (which provides much of our administrative support) to create a website that is user-friendly, informative and fun. The website was created by a local design firm, dynamIt, and we think they did a great job!
For an organization like CATCO, a good website is critical. As media coverage everywhere continues to shrink (think of the number of feature articles in today’s Columbus Dispatch vs. the same newspaper five years ago) it is challenging for theatre companies to sell their shows. Except for the mega-hit musicals, the titles of most plays – even New York hits – are unfamiliar to the general public. A newspaper ad, a mailing card, or a 30-second spot on the radio just doesn’t convey enough information about the play for a consumer to decide if he or she might want to see it.
CATCO’s new website will collect in one place everything you could ever want to know about any particular show. There will be plot summaries, reviews and critical quotes from other productions of the same play, samples of the dialogue, quotes from the playwright and all sorts of contextual information about the themes and subject matter. Better still, there will be video of rehearsals (or performances) as well as interviews, lots of photos and design renderings plus background on all the artists. There will be study guides for teachers and students, suggestions for further reading, listening and viewing, as well as “ratings” that will allow you to judge whether the play is suitable for your ten-year-old or whether you might instead want to bring your uninhibited brother-in-law. There’ll be information on how to get here, where to park, where to eat and what to do after the show.
Best of all, the new website will be interactive. Members of our company will post blogs like this one and you will be able to respond with your questions, comments and suggestions. (Here are two responses to our recent production of Blackbird that we would have posted here if the site had been up: “I found the subject of Blackbird offensive. I want to be entertained! I want to laugh ! I want to forget all the ugly things that go on in our society!” and “the show is really terrific. I am going to tell everyone I know. I just made it my facebook status.”)
You’ll be able to order tickets online. You’ll be able to make donations online (hint, hint). You’ll easily link to our Facebook and other social networking sites. Not everything is up and running right now, but it will be soon.
