Website Design for Downtown Houston Conference Producers

The four-tab shortlist a planner builds after dinner

Picture a planner on the couch comparing four producers in four browser tabs. Your first screen gets a few seconds to say what you produce and how to send a brief.

That after-dinner shortlist is where a lot of producer sites lose the job without ever knowing it. The planner isn't reading yet. They're scanning tabs and closing the ones that make them work. A site that opens with a moody reel and a slogan sends them hunting for the basics. A site that names the event types you run, in plain words, gets to stay open for round two.

We check this with a cheap trick. We show the homepage to someone who has never heard of you, count to ten, then take the phone back. If they can't tell us what kind of events you produce, the first screen needs work. It's a humbling test, and we run it on our own pages too. Plenty of sites fail it on the first try, and that's fine, because the fix usually starts with a single sentence.

Case pages that say which part of the show was yours

A great event photo can hide who did what. Write every case page so a planner can tell your crew's work apart from the venue's house team and the agency's creative.

1. Grab the call sheet Open the crew call sheet and the gear list from the show. Those two documents hold most of what a case page needs, with no memory required.
2. Pull five photos Pick one wide shot of the room, two of the stage, one of the control position and one of the crew at work. Check you're cleared to use each one.
3. Write the role line first One sentence on what your crew delivered. Everything else on the page hangs off that line, so get it right before anything else.
4. Get the producer's sign-off The producer who ran the show reads the draft and fixes anything that's off. We don't publish a case page without that check.
5. Link it from the format page Add the new case to its event format page, so a planner who lands there sees it straight away.

We like case pages that read like a stage manager's notes: short, specific and a little dry. A line such as 'we ran audio and two LED walls for a general session, with a 6 a.m. load-in' tells a planner more than any adjective could. It also keeps you honest. If the hotel supplied the house sound, say so. Planners compare notes with each other, and a producer who claims the whole show tends to get found out.

Give each event format its own set of cases. A planner hunting for a hybrid town hall doesn't want to wade through gala photos to find one. We'd take two or three strong cases per format over twenty thin ones. If a format has no cases yet, say what your crew would bring to it, and we'll link it to the closest job you've done.

Sizzle reels that don't sink the homepage

Keep the reel, but load it only when someone taps play. A still image stands in until then, so the page opens quickly on a phone at the back of a packed general session.

1. Pick one poster frame Choose a still from the reel that shows a finished stage with people in the room. Export it at the size it displays on the page. A camera's full-size file is far more than a phone needs.
2. Swap the embed for a click-to-play image The page shows the still with a play button, and the real player loads only after a tap. Developers call this a facade, and it's a small job.
3. Caption the reel in plain text Write two lines under it naming the event types and rooms shown. Search engines and AI tools can read those lines. They can't watch your reel.
4. Give the long cut its own page Keep a short cut on the homepage and link to the full reel. People who want the long version will click through, and everyone else gets a lighter page.
5. Test with the Wi-Fi off Open the page on a phone using cell data only. If the headline and the brief button show up before the reel, you're in good shape.

An autoplaying reel is one of the first things we check when a producer's homepage feels slow. It looks great on office Wi-Fi. It feels very different on a phone in a hotel lobby during a convention, when hundreds of people share one network. The still-image approach keeps the drama and drops the wait. You give up almost nothing, since few people sit through a muted reel on a small screen anyway.

We also look at everything else that loads with the homepage. Chat widgets, booking tools and tracking scripts pile up over the years. Each one felt small when someone added it. Together they can make a page crawl. We list every script, ask who still uses it and remove the ones nobody can name. Sometimes that list turns up two tools counting the same visit.

Venue notes for the convention center and its skybridge hotels

A short note on each room you've worked shows planners you already know the building. Stick to what your crew learned on site, and skip anything you only read about.

• Where your trucks unloaded, and how long the push to the room took
• Freight elevator size, if gear had to go up a level
• Power you pulled from the house and power you brought yourself
• Rigging you used, and who had to sign off on it
• Internet you ordered for a stream, wired or wireless
• One photo of your setup in that room, cleared to publish

To a planner, a general session in a hall and a breakout across a skybridge in a hotel are one event. To your crew, they're two load-ins with two sets of rules. A venue note that shows you've handled both tells the planner you won't be learning the building on their dime. If a planner asks about a room that's missing from your list, that's a fine opener for the first call. It tells you where the show is headed before anyone talks gear.

We'd write each note with your crew chief while the details are still fresh. Ten minutes on the phone after a show captures details that vanish by the following week. Our job is to shape those notes into a page a planner can scan. Their job is to make sure every word on it is true.

Floor plans, CAD files and the upload button you can skip

Keep attachments off the first form. Big drawings stall on hotel Wi-Fi, and a CAD file means little to your producers before they've talked to the planner anyway.

Shouldn't planners be able to attach a floor plan right away?

Some will want to, and it's fine to offer that as optional. Trouble starts when it's required. A planner at the early stage often has no floor plan yet, and a required upload tells them to come back later. Many never do. We'd rather send a shared folder link after the first call.

What about files that are too big for email?

Set up one shared folder per event on your side, with a clear name and an end date on the link. Drawings, the run of show and stage plots then live in one place instead of four inboxes.

Who should be able to see uploaded files?

Only the producer on the job and whoever owns the account. Event drawings can show a client's private layout. If you keep uploads on the form, we set them to land in storage your team controls. A public folder on the web server is no place for them.

Can the form remember what a planner already typed?

It should, if the form runs over more than one step. Nobody enjoys typing the event date twice. The accessibility rules say so too, as the note below explains.

Our rule of thumb is that the first form should take about as long as ordering a coffee. Anything that needs a file, a signature or a budget sheet belongs after a person has talked to the planner. That order helps your producers as well. They walk into the call knowing the event format and the room, and the heavy files arrive once both sides know the job is worth the effort.

We'd also keep the form short on the screen, even when it asks for a lot. Group the questions in small sets with clear labels, show a progress line if there's more than one step, and keep the send button in easy reach of a thumb. A planner filling it out on a train platform should never have to guess what a field wants.

Where the budget goes on a producer's website

A few requests add most of the work on a production company site. Knowing which ones they are lets you start lean and add the rest once briefs start arriving.

We'd rather launch a smaller site that's right than a big one that's half finished. Producers are busy, and case notes pile up slowly during show season. A site with two format pages, six solid cases and a brief form that works will serve planners better than a sprawling one full of placeholder text. You can grow it through the year, one case at a time, as shows wrap. Pricing gets set on a free call, when we can see which of these you really need.

A vendor page for the procurement desk

Big companies often need a new vendor set up before any deposit moves. A plain page that explains your paperwork path can save a week of back-and-forth email.

• How to request your W-9 and certificate of insurance, and who sends them
• Your legal business name, exactly as it appears on invoices
• Deposit and payment terms in plain words, if you publish them
• The payment methods you accept
• Who signs contracts on your side, with a shared inbox address
• How long a new-vendor setup usually takes at your end

This page never shows up in a pitch meeting, and nobody thanks you for it. It's still the page that keeps a signed job from stalling. The planner loves your proposal. Then their accounts team emails a general inbox, and nobody answers for three days because it looked like spam. We'd rather make that step dull and fast. Link the page from your footer and from the confirmation email, so it's there when someone in finance goes looking.

Our advice is to write this page with whoever handles your invoices. They know the questions finance teams ask, because they answer them every week. We turn their answers into plain wording, and they check it before it goes live. Then we add a date at the bottom, so everyone can see when the terms were last confirmed.

Should we list our insurance limits on the page?

Only if your broker agrees and someone keeps them current. A common approach is to say coverage details come with the certificate on request. That keeps a stale number from sitting on the page after a renewal.

What if a client's vendor portal asks for things we don't have?

Say so early. A planner would rather hear about a gap in week one than the day before a deposit is due. We'd add a line inviting finance teams to send their vendor checklist straight to your contracts inbox.

What your confirmation email says at 11 p.m.

Briefs arrive at odd hours. The automatic reply should name who will call and when, and it should give a faster route if the event is only days away.

The confirmation email is the first thing you ever send a planner, and it often gets forwarded more than anything else. It goes to their boss, sometimes to their client and sometimes to procurement. So it has to make sense out of context. We write it with the brief copied inside, a real name and a real time window. Pick a window your producers can hit during load-in week, when half of them are on a ballroom floor with their phones packed in a road case.

We also test the email the way a planner would see it. That means on a phone, in a busy inbox, next to a dozen other vendor replies. If the subject line just says 'Form submission,' it'll sink. We'd rather it say 'Your event brief for March 12 reached our team,' so it's easy to find again a week later.

Score each brief from zero to three for the first month

Counting briefs tells you volume. Scoring them tells you whether the new site brings in planners your producers actually want to call back.

We'd keep the score wherever your producers already work, whether that's a CRM, a shared sheet or a label in the inbox. Speed matters more than polish here. If marking a brief takes more than a few seconds, nobody will still be doing it by week three. After a month, compare the share of twos and threes with the month before launch. That one number says more about the redesign than traffic ever will.

Questions to ask a web designer before you share your showreel

Ask these on the first call with any web team. Clear answers show how they'll treat your footage, your forms and the briefs that arrive after launch.

Who will own the domain, the hosting and the video files when we're done?

You should, in accounts under your company's name. A designer can have access while the work runs. If the answer is 'we host it for you,' ask exactly what it takes to leave.

How will you keep the reel from slowing the homepage?

Listen for a still image that loads the player on tap, or something close to it. A shrug, or 'we'll compress it,' is a sign to keep asking.

Where do briefs go when the form is sent, and how do we know it worked?

A good answer names the inbox or CRM, the test they'll run before launch and who gets an alert if delivery fails.

What will you need from our producers, and when?

Case notes, cleared photos and venue notes take time to gather in show season. A team that asks for them early is planning around your calendar.

What can we edit ourselves after launch?

Case pages and venue notes change as your crew works new rooms. You should be able to add one without calling anybody. We walk clients through that before we hand over the keys.

You'd be the first Downtown Houston production company on our books, so your crew chiefs will know those loading docks far better than we do. That knowledge stays theirs. We bring more than 1,400 live websites of practice at turning notes like theirs into pages a planner can scan fast. Our team works from Indianapolis, and Jeff Clerisier, who founded the company, still runs it.

The first strategy call costs you nothing. We'll look at your current site with you, ask about the briefs your producers love and hate, and tell you plainly which fixes we'd make first. If we're not the right team for the job, we'll say so on that call.