ts.com

National Galleries of Scotland launch summer exhibitions with new website offering online print-at-home tickets

National Galleries of Scotland have launched their summer season of exhibitions with the unveiling of a series of new micro-sites and online ticketing system. Art lovers can now preview the exhibitions online through the micro-sites before buying tickets at the click of a mouse and printing out their own queue-beating tickets at home.

The five exhibitions, being held at the National Galleries of Scotland's venues, have each been given bespoke designed and built micro-sites so visitors can preview the world-class art on show. Each micro-site includes a fully integrated and branded online ticketing system to seamlessly take customers through the process of buying and printing out their own tickets at home. The system will ensure that queues at the popular summer exhibitions will be kept to a minimum. The standards of the micro-sites are extremely exacting, meeting all W3C compliancy guidelines and ensuring they are compatible with screen-readers and navigation by keyboard as well as mouse. The colours of the images on the micro-sites have also been digitised to closely represent the paintings in the galleries - even down to the greens of Van Gogh's Oleanders painted in 1888.

The website and the ticketing system that powers National Galleries of Scotland's online tickets service have been provided by ts.com - a leading UK ticketing and web development service provider, and the Van Gogh exhibition can be viewed at http://www.nationalgalleries.org/vangogh/ .

ts.com's Internet-delivered ticketing system ticketingsolutions will bring added benefits to the National Galleries including the capability to drive sales through eMarketing. The flexible system will also handle phone and walk-up sales for the galleries ensuring that one centralised system meets all their needs for this summer's series of exhibitions.

Martin Reynolds, Head of Marketing at National Galleries of Scotland, said, "the range of art in this summer's exhibitions promises to attract thousands of visitors to our galleries. We see the online experience as an extension of the visit to the galleries, providing visitors not only with the ability to book their tickets in advance but also with another way to appreciate the special art we are bringing to Scotland this summer."

Matthew Hare, Managing Director of Oxford-based ts.com, the company behind the ticketingsolutions system, said, "the National Galleries of Scotland came to us with a challenging brief. They wanted a range of bespoke micro-sites which would seamlessly integrate with a National Galleries-branded ticketing capability to be designed, built and launched within weeks. At ts.com we have experienced web developers working alongside our capable designers and ticketing specialists. This means we were able to deliver to the National Galleries a carefully designed and fully integrated solution well within their timescale. The National Galleries' team in Edinburgh were also able to preview the sites at each stage in their development via a remote log-in so they could oversee every aspect of the project from start to finish, making sure we were able to deliver exactly what they wanted."

Martin added, "ts.com really did exceed our expectations for the design and development of the new micro-sites and the delivery of the ticketingsolutions system. We are expecting this summer to be one most exciting and successful ever, supported by a ticketing system we can rely on."