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Industries · №006

Websites for the arts.

You put work in front of people for a living. Your website should do the same.

Brief · №006

A website for arts organizations

  1. 01The work, up front
  2. 02What's on, at a glance
  3. 03Members and supporters
  4. 04Accessible by design

Silvanè Studios · Fergus, Ontario

For arts organizations01

Silvanè Studios designs websites for arts organizations, festivals, galleries, writers' and artists' associations and cultural nonprofits, from our studio in Fergus to organizations across Ontario, Canada and beyond. Every site leads with the work and the people behind it, and makes the next event, membership or donation easy to act on.

The brief02

What a website for arts organizations has to do

  1. 01

    The work, up front

    Artists, programs and past seasons shown with the care you'd give an exhibition, not as a list of links.

  2. 02

    What's on, at a glance

    Upcoming events, dates and tickets on the homepage, entered once in your events system and shown everywhere.

  3. 03

    Members and supporters

    Join, renew, donate and volunteer, one tap from any page and connected to the membership tools you already use.

  4. 04

    Accessible by design

    Readable type, strong contrast and proper structure to WCAG 2.2 AA, because the arts are for everyone.

Where it goes wrong03

Why most arts sites fall short

The most creative organizations often have the least designed websites.

Budgets go to programming, so the site gets patched each season: an events page here, a newsletter form there. The result hides the work and the calendar, and asks volunteers to maintain something nobody fully understands.

The approach04

Designed to be kept up by volunteers.

We work within the platform you already have, whether that's Squarespace, WordPress or another CMS, using its own tools wherever possible so staff and volunteers can update everything. Mockups come first, so your board sees exactly what will be built before anything changes. We respond to RFPs as well as direct enquiries.

See how we work for other businesses in selected work, and how a project runs in our process.

Questions05

Questions arts organizations ask

Do you respond to RFPs for arts organizations?
Yes. Send us the brief and we'll reply with a proposal, mockup approach, timeline and fixed price.
Can you redesign our Squarespace site without custom code?
Yes. A strong design can be built entirely with Squarespace's native tools, so volunteers can edit every part of it.
Will our events calendar still work?
Yes. We keep your events, membership and ticketing tools connected, so events are entered once and appear wherever they're needed.
Can you also make social video for our season?
Yes. Social video is one of the studio's services: short vertical films for Reels and TikTok in the same look as the site.

Where we work

FergusGuelphKitchenerWaterlooMiltonMississaugaToronto
Other industries06

Websites for other industries

All industries

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