web story.

Mission.

Akvárium Klub is one of the most cutting edge event venues in Budapest, hosting a range of events from concerts and electronic music nights to stage productions, conferences, gala nights and other promotional events.

They asked us to design and develop a new website that helps them communicate this wide variety in a simple and uncluttered way to a very diverse audience including professional event planners, tourists and local music fans.

Design.

Based on a thorough requirements analysis with our client, we identified the following key objectives for the design process:

display the upcoming events in a clear manner
simple and fast ticket purchasing process
strong focus on young tourists looking for a night out

Another key constraint was created by the fact that there is often a dearth of quality press photos for the events, which imposed restrictions on the final layout. This can be seen on the homepage hero slider, where we created a way to blend half width pictures seamlessly into the full width section. The final design had to adhere to both Akvárium Klub’s brand identity, and the colours of their main sponsor, Telekom.

The main constraint during design was the need to incorporate Akvárium Klub’s existing e-commerce solution. We also had to provide a way for some events to use third-party booking solutions. This also meant that we had limited ways to affect the checkout experience, so during the design of the initial wireframes we focused on making it easier and faster for visitors to find the events they are interested in. Another key constraint was created by the fact that there is often a dearth of quality press photos for the events, which imposed restrictions on the final layout. This can be seen on the homepage hero slider, where we created a way to blend half width pictures seamlessly into the full width section. The final design had to adhere to both Akvárium Klub’s brand identity, and the colours of their main sponsor, Telekom.

Develop.

with events often lasting long into the night and weekends, this was much appreciated. We worked closely with the development team behind Akvárium Klub’s custom e-commerce solution to integrate it seamlessly into the new website. This meant developing a custom plugin to let content managers interact with the tickets through an API, and embedding the existing checkout frontend into a single Wordpress page.

We have decided to implement the final designs using Wordpress as a CMS, mainly chosen for its ease-of-use and maintainability. This also allowed us to create custom content management features tailored to our clients specific needs. We have developed custom image editing tools to help non-designer content managers easily transform pictures received from publicists. Another pain point that Wordpress solved out-of-the-box was the automated unpublishing of content related to past events - with events often lasting long into the night and weekends, this was much appreciated. We worked closely with the development team behind Akvárium Klub’s custom e-commerce solution to integrate it seamlessly into the new website. This meant developing a custom plugin to let content managers interact with the tickets through an API, and embedding the existing checkout frontend into a single Wordpress page.