OperaFestival di Roma is a non-profit educational institution that offers opportunities to musicians from all nations to study and perform opera in Italy each summer.
Operafestival di Roma - after
Operafestival di Roma - before
We’ve been doing their site since 1999. At first, their budget was next to nothing and their site consisted of one page on AOL that turned into a giant scroll-a-rama as their program grew. The next year we got them a proper domain name. The year after that we put their application online and gave them some ecommerce functionality so they could take application fees and donations through their site. The screenshot on the bottom is the home page as it looked in the beginning.
The program has really grown and is now one of the most highly respected and sought-after opera training programs. Since they are recruiting singers and instrumentalists from all over the world, this site is a vital part of their marketing effort. In 2003, they decided to invest in a major upgrade, and we’re all quite pleased with the results.
We added more sophisticated ecommerce functionality, sound clips, a slide show, more intuitive navigation and a new layout that shows off the breadth of the program with its beautiful costumes, spectacular venue in Rome and overall commitment to excellence.
In 2007, they got a new online payment system. While our code was the latest and greatest in 2003, nearly five years later it was looking a little old and scary. So we re-did the entire site so it now validates using the strictest of web standards. Our client didn’t ask us to do that, (and of course we didn’t charge them) but we feel that back-end code should be as clean and pretty as the front-end that faces the public. Yes, we are that geeky!