Summer success online for the National Galleries of Scotland

With the launch of a series of high profile summer art exhibitions, the National Galleries of Scotland needed a website with a difference. To be delivered within a short timeframe, the site had two key objectives; to allow visitors to preview the art on show at the galleries online, and to provide them with the facility to purchase their tickets quickly and easily in advance of their visit. ts.com stepped up to the challenge with its experienced team of web designers and, integrated with their online advance booking system IRIS Web, they designed, built and launched a bespoke website and accompanying range of micro-sites offering visitors the opportunity to explore the summer exhibitions and pre-book tickets online.

Each of the new sites (www.nationalgalleries.org/summer/) has been carefully designed to meet the highest standards for user accessibility and to ensure full compliancy with W3C guidelines. Easily read by screen-readers and navigable by keyboard or mouse, the sites reflect the National Galleries commitment to making world-class art available to all. Martin Reynolds, Head of Marketing at the National Galleries of Scotland, explains, we wanted a multi-purpose website that would set a new benchmark. Visually it needed to impress but it also had to offer quick and easy online booking and allow us to manage all the ticketing effectively in-house. IRIS Ticketing Solutions integrated approach meant that the whole design and implementation process ran very smoothly.

The National Galleries were provided with a remote log-in facility enabling them to preview the sites at each stage in their development and oversee every aspect of the project from start to finish, ensuring complete satisfaction with the end result. We envisage the online experience as an extension of a visit to the galleries, “ says Martin, "and we are very keen for potential visitors to be able to sample the art or exhibition online.

With the advance booking system ticketingsolutions from ts.com seamlessly integrated into both the main website and the micro-sites, visitors to the galleries can conveniently book their exhibition tickets in advance online, resulting in fewer queues on the day for customers and increased advance revenue for the National Galleries. As Martin says, the IRIS Web system even allows customers to print out their own bar-coded tickets at home. These tickets are then simply scanned at the galleries, speeding entry to all the exhibitions.

The fully flexible IRIS Web system also handles phone and walk-up sales for the National Galleries, with the centralised database providing the added benefit of real-time reporting and sales monitoring on all these sales channels.

Martin concludes, IRIS Ticketing Solutions exceeded our expectations for the design and development of the new micro-sites and the delivery of the IRIS Web system. They not only provided us with a complete ticketing system that we can manage ourselves, they also quickly identified and fulfilled the needs of our online audience. We are expecting this summer to be one of the most exciting and successful ever, supported by a ticketing system we can rely on.