Melbourne Recital Centre (MRC) stands as one of Australia’s premier cultural institutions, known for delivering world-class live music experiences. As part of a new brand refresh, MRC sought a website that would bridge the gap between online and onsite interactions, making their digital presence as dynamic and inspiring as their performances.

Key goals included improving accessibility for all users, elevating the presentation of events and artist content, and modernising the technical foundation to support future growth. The new site needed to seamlessly integrate with Tessitura v16 for ticketing and self-service features, while introducing a more intuitive event exploration and booking process.

With an extensive calendar of events and diverse user base, MRC required a flexible and powerful platform that delivered a premium user experience across all devices.

Visit the Melbourne Recital Centre website

We researched, designed and developed a fully custom solution that prioritises accessibility, performance, and ease of use, while unveiling MRC's daring new brand to the world.

• Research-led: Early discovery activities engaged a wide array of internal MRC stakeholders, as well as in-depth sessions with a cross section of MRC's diverse audience.

• Accessible Design: Adhered to WCAG guidelines, ensuring all users can navigate and engage with the site seamlessly.

• Enhanced Event Pages: Designed event pages to guide users with storytelling, clear CTAs, and rich media, encouraging ticket conversions.

• Dynamic Colour System: Implemented a system that dynamically applies MRC's new brand palette, creating visual consistency across all pages.

• Custom Select-Your-Own-Seat (SYOS) Tool: Developed an intuitive and mobile-friendly SYOS interface, making the booking process easy and engaging.

• Tessitura v16 Integration: Integrated the latest version of Tessitura to support robust ticketing, membership, and donation pathways.

• Flexible Content Modules: Empowered MRC's marketing team with an easy-to-manage CMS featuring modular content blocks for showcasing events and artist stories.

• Technical development on Umbraco 14 CMS

• Custom Tessitura REST API integrations to create a seamless purchase pathway 

• Full device responsiveness across various resolutions for mobile, tablet and desktop

• WCAG 2.0 AA accessibility compliance 

• Ongoing support, maintenance and hosting 

The new Melbourne Recital Centre website sets a benchmark for cultural institutions by delivering a rich, immersive, and accessible digital experience. The fully custom SYOS tool has transformed the booking experience, making seat selection faster and more user-friendly, especially for mobile users.

With dynamic branding elements and a thoughtfully structured CMS, MRC’s team now has full control over how they present their content, engaging audiences with minimal technical barriers.

The platform is built for long-term scalability and is already supporting future plans for further enhancements, ensuring MRC remains at the forefront of digital innovation in the arts sector.

Digital Strategy

Discovery

User Experience (UX) Design

Visual Design

Front-end website development

Back-end technical development (Umbraco CMS)

Tessitura CRM integration

Testing

Accessibility compliance (WCAG AA)

Project management