Responses by Simon Carr, founder/creative director, DesignUps

Background: Based in Nashville, Tennessee, the Ryman Auditorium is a renowned music venue that is recognized as one of the best places to experience live music. DesignUps worked with the Ryman to create a site focusing on its live events and highlighting the venue’s unique history. The website redesign was launched in January of 2017 as a part of the Ryman’s 125th Anniversary celebration.

Highlights: The series pages, interactive timeline and the Hatch Show Prints. Our team is passionate about the music industry and getting the chance to work with the Ryman was exciting. We had a collaborative process with Ryman’s marketing and creative department, resulting in a website that has brought more fans to see great music.

Challenges: Creating a website that is scalable to support the massive amount of site traffic when tickets go on sale, and taking into account that concertgoers were likely to view the site on a mobile device. On top of making the custom code, we also had to make the Events pages easily maintainable. One challenge we hadn’t anticipated was launching the website the night of a Jason Isbell concert—we couldn’t make it to the show!

Favorite details: We’re most proud of how the website has been received by people who use it on a daily basis and how it highlights the history of one of Nashville’s most iconic institutions. It’s a thrill to know that thousands of people visit the site, which is often the first step to attending a show at the Ryman.

Anything new: We did quite a bit of research and code testing to reach a scalable solution that would be very fast loading. We also learned that showing a minimal amount of information provides the best user experience versus an overwhelming amount of options.

Technical features: The website was built using WordPress and created with a custom responsive theme. We utilized and extended WordPress plugins such as Events Calendar Pro and created interactive elements for the website using Javascript and jQuery. We also used parallax headers on the artist series pages and the interactive history timeline.