De Balie is a household name in Amsterdam and the surrounding area. It is the institution for free speech, art, politics and culture. De Balie's website was in need of a technical upgrade and has been completely rebuilt to today's technical standards. Easy to manage and a pleasant experience for the visitor.

The program – the central place within the website

The heart of the website is of course the programming of the activities in De Balie. On the program page, the user can use various custom filters to see exactly what can be done and when. From the overview of results you can immediately see how many tickets are still available and you can easily click through to order tickets directly.

The programming from previous years has also been made transparent and searchable. This way you can always see when certain events have been organized and the programming remains searchable by Google.

Automatic connections, narrowcasting and integration with offline touchpoints for even more Digital Power

In addition to the programming of the various meetings, De Balie also has a cinema room where films are shown. Both the programming of meetings and the films are automatically loaded onto the website from Active Tickets, De Balie's back office. For example, planned events and films are created and entered once and automatically end up in the CMS of the website via a custom link. The web editors can enrich the program items here for the web and then publish them.

There are screens in De Balie where visitors can see more information about planned activities for that day. A number of protected pages on the website – which use a template optimized for the screens – show the day's programming. These pages are then displayed on the screens. For example, through narrowcasting, the online and offline touchpoints are nicely integrated with each other and De Balie makes optimal use of the Digital clout of the website.

The De Balie website always used ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) to manage pages flexibly. With the arrival of Gutenberg, a flexible shell has been created in the back-end of WordPress to build pages with. We built the old ACF fields and functionalities from scratch in Gutenberg. This means that De Balie is assured of a website that is completely future-proof and has been delivered according to the latest state of technology.

Live streams and podcasts

Videos of meetings and podcasts can also be found on De Balie's website. By linking to Vimeo, certain events can also be viewed live on the website via a livestream.

The videos and podcasts are free to watch and listen to. The website has a built-in function that allows the user to make a voluntary contribution to viewing the content. An accessible additional income channel has been set up so that De Balie's content remains accessible to the widest possible audience.