Getting movie tickets shouldn’t be such an event.

This post first started in early 2009, back when the Event Cinemas site was still found at the greaterunion.com.au domain. As evidenced across social media channels, many users were frustrated by an awkward and poorly serviced website provided by one of Australia’s leading entertainment providers. I wanted to summarise many of the site failures into a post about fixing poorly performing site problems.

With much fanfare and re-branding of their physical cinema complexes a new site was thrust upon the public. I hoped they had addressed the many issues with their old site.

It was a failure.

The early days provided sub standard delivery for the load that was being demanded. Outside of numerous functional and architectural errors, the performance of the sites was dreadful and slow. Unfortunately at times that is still true.

How can this be?

How can a company that has been running a service for multiple years not provide the capacity to deliver with an upgraded site? How can they not have planned for increased demand

So far I can only see answers that should make any business owner / manager cringe and take notice. Without being fully aware of the inside of Event Cinemas nor their IT departments, Marketing departments or management teams, I am using my many years experience in producing web properties, plus 13 years running a business to draw my conclusions. I would love to be proven wrong.

Yes the white box does need some content ireckon

At the time the site felt like it was a business / marketing after thought. It is of course a piece in a very big puzzle. Truly rebranding an entire organisation in a short time frame is a massive task. Re working every piece of marketing internal and external, retraining a workforce of its size, and preparing for D-day is a task many of us would shy away from.

Unfortunately that is not an adequate excuse.

The internet has to be a hugely significant part of their business. It is not ‘new’ and hasn’t been for quite some time. There must be a plethora of statistics relating to the old site, and in an ideal world they might have looked and calculated what demand would be required.

This isn’t an organisation without any resources. It does however appear to be one that does not apply the right resources to its digital presence. The only other alternative is that management views the website, it’s web department or suppliers and the public that use their web site with contempt.

I seriously hope that is not the case and it is more a lack of planning.

Initially there was little presence behind their Twitter and Facebook accounts. People were scathing and demanding someone to answer them. It took quite some time coming. Hats off to those who have to handle it now. They had a huge task to get back to people and try to offer some assistance. There is no offline method to get service from this organisation. In reality the infrastructure still struggles. Many technical issues have been resolved but much of the time the support staff are handling are fundamentals.

Given all this, is there something to learn?

I believe so, even if Event Cinemas won’t address them other organisations can.

There are too many things wrong to cover in a post already too long. I am going to separate them out in a series under the ‘Site Doctor’ category which I have not done much with recently.

These posts will include:

• Capacity management
• Using Historical Analytics to plan for the future
• Critical marketing flaws
• Usability Issues
• A simple planning guide to getting it right next time

These are going to take some time but to reinforce my point the main image for this post from last weekend highlights many things are still not well in the online world of Event Cinemas. A little content is required!

Well that’s what ireckon anyway