Web Design & Development

Confederation Centre of the Arts

Confederation Centre of the Arts is a national historic site in the heart of Charlottetown and home to the Charlottetown Festival, a national art gallery, an arts academy and heritage programming. We designed and developed a website that brings it all together, from buying tickets and browsing exhibitions to registering for classes and giving to the Centre.

With theatre, music, visual art, arts education, heritage tours and leadership programming under one roof, the Centre needed a website that serves ticket buyers, gallery visitors, students, parents and donors without overwhelming any of them. We organized the site around what people come to do: see a show, visit the gallery, take a class or support the Centre. Each program area has its own colour and navigation, a single What’s On calendar ties everything together, and the site can be switched to French from any page.

One calendar brings everything happening at the Centre together: shows in the Sobey Family Theatre and outdoor amphitheatre, gallery events, Arts Academy programs, heritage tours and Palmer Institute talks. Visitors can search, filter by program and venue and sort by date, then open a show page with dates, venue, video and a Buy Tickets button.

The Confederation Centre Art Gallery has a national mandate to share Canadian visual art. Its section of the site presents current, upcoming and past exhibitions, gallery events, publications and exhibition proposals, with hours and admission front and centre and a growing archive of past exhibitions.

The Arts Academy offers classes, camps and workshops in dance, music, musical theatre and visual arts for all ages. Families can browse every class with dates and prices, explore programs by discipline and find camps, scholarships, school groups and FAQs in one place.

With hundreds of shows, exhibitions, classes and news stories, visitors needed a faster way to find what they’re looking for. We built an advanced global search that opens full-screen from any page and returns results instantly as you type, grouped into On Stage, Art Gallery, Information, News and more. One click takes visitors straight to the show, exhibition or page they want, on desktop and mobile.

A large arts centre has a lot to navigate, so we designed a full-screen mega menu that turns the whole site into a visual directory. Each area of the Centre, from the Art Gallery and Arts Academy to Heritage Tours and the Palmer Institute, gets its own image and expands to reveal its key pages, so visitors can see everything the Centre offers at a glance.

As a registered charity, the Centre relies on its donors. The Support the Centre section covers every way to give, from one-time and monthly donations through a built-in giving form to endowed gifts, gifts of securities, sponsorship, naming a seat and volunteering.

Visitors check show times and buy tickets on the go, so every page is built mobile-first, with the What’s On calendar, class listings and donation form all easy to use on a small screen.