CoisCéim Dance Theatre Website

In 2021, CoisCéim Dance Theatre moved into their new home. A landmark building at 42 Fairview Strand. CoisCéim desired to harness the rich heritage of their new building to develop a self-sustaining space where dance can thrive. By 2022, CoisCéim had developed their business Strategy, ‘Three Anchors to Thrive’ – of the core values to implement – ‘Sustainability and Accessibility’ in everything that they do was key. It’s 2024, and CoisCéim are celebrating their 30th year in creating dance. The time was now ripe to completely overhaul their existing website, as it was not fit-for-purpose anymore. The old site was a patchwork of design and functionality dating from 1999. The website carbon calculator stated it was “dirtier than 96% of web pages tested”. The challenge was to design a new site that met their day-to-day needs, celebrated their achievements, complimented their new home, and incorporated their strategic values of accessibility and sustainability.

A mammoth project due to the migration of 30 years of data. This site is fabricated from the ground up, designed with the visitor experience at its core – from CoisCéim’s audiences, participants, professional artists, to their stakeholders, dance students, or just someone new – who wants to find out immediately who CoisCéim are. A site that allows the user to find out about, and book CoisCeim’s latest show, attend a dance class, book the studio space, or wants to do a deep-dive into their 30 year archive.

Visual Design: At it’s essence the design of this new site is to create the ‘look and feel’ that complimented their new landmark home. Their virtual room so to speak. The composition of the site is asymmetric to reflect their contemporary art practice. The colours and textures used stem from the interior walls of their studio. By using their font ‘Bell Gothic’ kept this site on brand, by adding a complimentary serif font ‘Bely’ gave contrast, warmth and a nod to the history of their Edwardian building. Subtle elements of constant movement are within the site to reinforce the fact that they are a dance company, from their logo to the continuous movement of the background. Imagery is a key feature. This site is responsive.

Accessibility: This site uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to define structure and layout. If your browser does not support CSS or if you turn disable CSS support the content of each page is still readable. Structured semantic markup has been used for this sites pages. H1 tags are used for main titles, H2 tags for subtitles and so on. Links are generally written to make sense out of context. All fonts are scalable allowing users to define the base font size. All forms are coded using LABEL and ID attributes. All content images contain descriptive ALT attributes. All pages were developed to conform at a minimum with the Double AA rating of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines v2.0. The HTML code that underpins this site validates to the HTML5 standard. The CSS that define the structure and look of this site validates to W3C standards. All roll-overs incorporate contrast ratios for accessibility.

Sustainability: this new website, sustainability has been considered at every stage of the process and includes building a bespoke content management system. All images used were optimised to reduce file size. The website is hosted on 100% renewal energy. The result is that at this time, the International Website Carbon Calculator - stated “Hurrah! This website has achieved a “B” rating...being cleaner than 82% of web pages globally...” – A big difference to their old site. CoisCéim attained one of their key sustainability goals from their business strategy.