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RoadHouse Cinemas, a local dine-in theater, was looking for options to replace an existing WordPress website.
The old site required manual system maintenance and was not friendly to users on mobile devices.
While fielding customer complaints from online customers RoadHouse also managed periodic site crashes. Even worse, occasionally the site traffic could also cause system performance issues or crashes on the POS systems themselves. RoadHouse contacted us for help on multiple levels.
The team at Desert Lab Studio recognized the design flaws in the original website and took a deep dive into the primary objectives of the RoadHouse website redesign. Through discussion with the management team we were able to better define several major pain points.
The professionals at Desert Lab Studio worked with the owners to develop solutions around each area of concern. We recognized that, rather than being a liability, the website could be a powerful means to building a positive brand image, increasing sales, and providing operational support to the business.
Following a proven agile life-cycle process we leveraged years of experience to design and release a new solution on the Theater Toolkit platform for RoadHouse Cinemas.
RoadHouse's new site was built using Theater Toolkit—a niche, exhibitor-specific CMS which allows for easy content management, direct integration to popular point of sale systems, and pain-free development for customizations.
Special caching mechanisms ensure server calls cause as little interference in the ticket-purchasing process as possible, and site crashes caused by high traffic became a thing of the past.
We designed RoadHouse using a mobile-first approach, ensuring that key elements of the UI throughout the ticket purchasing process would fit within a phone screen with minimal scrolling. Each step of the checkout needed to be simple and intuitive. With that in mind, we kept each page minimal and focused on a single checkout task.
RoadHouse's new site now geolocates the user, making manual venue selection unnecessary. For mobile users we elected to forward users straight to the movie showtimes on initial site load, so on-the-go users can access showtimes quickly and without needless browsing.
We integrated food menu data and other content to finalize the site and minimize customer phonecalls to the theater for information. We ensured key pages print well, and that the entire site is search-engine-optimized for increased exposure in search engines.
RoadHouse's website ticket sales have surpassed 93% of all ticket sales, massively eclipsing box office and other sales channels
Customer satisfaction is up, and staff expenses for website management and online customer issues are at an all-time low. RoadHouse now boasts a vastly accelerated checkout time—the average checkout speed is under three minutes, which is about 450% faster than in their previous website.
The bar graph compares revenue in 2017 to that of 2018.
The bar graph compares organic search acquisitions in 2017 to those of 2018. The pie graph breaks down acquisitions in the latter period by source (Google, Bing, etc.).
Theater Toolkit has been instrumental for our online success. Not only does the site look great, it is fast. We have grown our online ticket sales to over 94% with this platform. Even better, now when we have major releases the site is robust and handles the huge traffic loads much better than our previous solution!
Whether it’s resource and capacity planning, solution implementation, or the end-to-end management of business systems and product design, Desert Lab Studio solution experts are available to help reduce overhead and ensure the success of your business.