New England Dance Theatre

Website Case StudiesNew England Dance Theatre
Written By Angela Hoskins

Case Study

New England Dance Theatre homepage on different devices.

What makes the New England Dance Theatre’s website stand out is the imagery — the photographic content on this site is outstanding.

Armidale’s best dance school has already an impressive portfolio of local performances, including the Eisteddfod and end of year concerts, all photographically documented. Photography from NEDT’s stage performances is comprehensive — it was hard to know which photos to choose — I was given so many to to select from to build the website.

That’s where NEDT’s Founding Director, Penny Gurner, stepped into help with her directing skills. Penny is an artist, with very clear objectives for her dance school. She has a professional background in dance, she’s been in the industry for years. The content she handed over for her website was comprehensive — not just the photographs, but information about her range of dance classes, uniforms, timetables and all the rest. All this contributes to a very helpful website for anyone looking to enrol into a dance class in Armidale — and there’s a range to choose from.

Ranking on search engine results pages

With such great content, I was expecting the new website to swiftly climb the ranks of the search engine results pages. However new websites with new domain names do take time to get ranked well.

Attending to a website’s SEO (search engine optimisation) requires regular work. This includes fine tuning the keywords and content to ensure that not only search engines are impressed with the content, but the audience and site users are equally impressed: they find the information they’re looking for; they want to revisit the site for more; they don’t quickly bounce off the site, disappointed with the content. The site has to offer a good user experience.

I don’t imagine that anyone interested in dance — ballet, jazz, contemporary — or beautiful photography would bounce off the New England Dance Theatre’s website. It was a pleasure working on the site, and it’s always great to revisit it.

So, 4 months after going live, I think the site is finally getting ranked well. Not too bad for a new website with a new domain name. After 6 months, New England Dance Theatre’s website was at the top of page one for ‘ballet dance classes Armidale’ search query.

Platform: Squarespace

Angela Hoskins

Built my first site in 2000 and steadily learned what it takes to make websites work. Dabbled in WordPress back then, still do. Since building my first Squarespace site in 2016, I’ve been impressed with the relatively streamlined approach to website design and development that Squarespace offers compared to WordPress. SEO was a major challenge from the start — I’ve spent a lot of time keeping up with what’s required to get sites working, ranking well on a SERP. I have confidence with what Squarespace offers for SEO.

Having worked for more than 10 years in the web team of an inland, regional university in Australia and dealing with frustrations that come with working for a large corporate enterprise, the idea of setting up my own web design business became my goal.

Set up my business in late 2017. Opted for a sea change, too: I now live on Coochiemudlo Island 45 minutes from Brisbane. Love working from home. Love working for small business clients. Still get casual work with the university.

Challenges? The main one is pricing my work for small businesses. Doing quality work, doing the research to be up to date in the industry, takes time; it’s hard to factor in this time to my pricing while being competitive in the market and affordable for many small businesses.

https://sitecontent.com.au
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