The Tung Auditorium
An exceptional new space to listen to live music!
With cutting edge acoustic specification this is a remarkable space for solo, chamber, choral and orchestral performances, and with adjustable acoustics it can accommodate a wide variety of jazz, folk, pop, electro-acoustic and experimental music too.
The brief
The University of Liverpool commissioned Kind to design and build an accessible, and easy-to-use website, with integrated event ticketing, to showcase upcoming performances at their new state-of-the-art concert hall.
I did the Craft build: the content model, the templates and the entire front-end. The site launched in 2022.
A hall and a website, built at the same time
The Tung Auditorium sits inside the Yoko Ono Lennon Centre, designed by Ellis Williams with acoustic specification from Arup, and owned and operated by the University of Liverpool. Adjustable acoustics let one room handle solo recitals, orchestras, jazz and experimental programmes.
When work started on the website, none of that existed to photograph. There were no performances to review and no audience to show. The site had to persuade people to buy tickets for a room nobody had sat in yet.
The box office lives on the website
Ticketing runs on Spektrix, the box office and CRM system most UK arts venues use. Spektrix supplies the booking journey as web components, which can then be skinned to match the site around them. The usual shortcut is to skip that and hand people off to Spektrix’s own hosted pages, which moves your audience onto a different domain and a different design halfway through a purchase.
Here the journey stays put. A colleague wired up the integration itself. I styled those components, so choosing a seat looks like the rest of the venue’s site rather than a bolted-on checkout.
Live availability
Listings read their status from Spektrix, so a sold-out concert says sold out instead of walking someone into a dead end.
One domain, start to finish
Listings, seat selection, basket and checkout all sit on the venue’s own site, so the design and the trust signals don’t change mid-purchase.
Craft for everything else
Spektrix owns the ticketing data. Craft owns the words and pictures, so the team can write about a concert without touching the box office.
Built to be handed over
Flexible templates and multi-use components, plus training for the venue’s team, so new pages don’t need a developer.
Kind have been a pleasure to work with, they were friendly, enthusiastic and very receptive to our requirements and approached the project with both professionalism and good humour. We now have a slick venue website with a full box office integration. Thank you!
