Opera Kelowna is a registered, non-profit, charitable opera company delivering exceptional Canadian opera performances and engaging audiences across the Okanagan since 2013. A member of the Association for Opera in Canada (AOC), they are dedicated to bringing the power and passion of opera to their community.
When Opera Kelowna approached us, they had an outdated website with a complicated user interface and a dark design. Site management was convoluted, and users were unable to locate upcoming events. They also had a lot of duplicated content and could not manage that content on the site’s backend. They needed a complete website refresh to assist with ramping up community interest in events after Covid had put a pause on most of them.
Lydia Avsec from Copilot Design created beautiful design elements for the VM designer, Tina Raposo, to utilize in her overall website redesign. From those elements, she made two homepage banners that could be swapped out to feature significant events or several upcoming events at a glance for visitors to easily see what they could attend. In the pillars section, she used curved separations to allude to the flowing organic nature of music and art. A music staff motif and semi-circle background shapes to match the O in the logo were used throughout the site. To lighten up the design, in comparison to their previous website, vibrant reds and whites were applied to create a brighter mood and help the pillars appear more vivid.
VM’s lead developer, Peter Vigilante, built the site on the WordPress platform. The opera site posed some unique challenges requiring more custom development than most VM websites. The result is new systems that allow VM to continue to offer even more dynamic and user-friendly experiences to the clients for managing their website.
We created a completely custom Event Calendar system to add all the performances, education programs, and community events. Every performance can have associated artists for each event, and those artists will then have all the performances they have been a part of listed automatically in their Artist Profile. Each event can also have multiple venues and dates and times for each venue (something most other event software did not offer.)
It was a pleasure working with the Opera Kelowna team to create this stunning and functional website. Vigilante Marketing is a proud sponsor of Opera Kelowna.
Vigilante Marketing
Christine Ginther
Tina Raposo
Peter Vigilante
