Your Cinema, a site for sore eyes

Your Cinema, a site for sore eyes

For more than a decade, we’ve run Flicks in Australasia. The Flicks websites—flicks.com.au and flicks.co.nz—are nationwide movie and cinema guides.

A couple of years ago, we launched a new product: Your Cinema, a website solution for cinemas. Cinemas were asking for a website solution, and as far as we could see, many existing cinema websites simply weren’t good enough. We knew we could take them to new heights.

From our experience running Flicks, we came to this solution with two key insights that would define how we structured Your Cinema: what moviegoers want, and what cinemas want.

So, what do moviegoers want? Tickets and times, of course

You’d be shocked to discover that all our experience and data shows that above all, when moviegoers go to cinema sites, they want (surprise surprise!) showtimes and tickets for the latest films.

It may sound obvious, but it’s one of the biggest frustrations for customers when they’re using cinemas’ websites. Extensive research backs it up. Too many sites make things too difficult; too many clicks to get information, too many different pages to browse for a single movie’s showtimes, too much time and effort required to find what you’re looking for, or worst of all, not being able to find it at all.

We couldn’t let this stand. Life has more than enough frustrating speedbumps, so our design and UX philosophies are geared towards making this process silky smooth for moviegoers.

The vast majority of moviegoers come to cinema sites in search of showtimes and tickets for today, and for the latest releases. That’s why Your Cinema homepages prioritize this information.

Of course, tickets aren’t the only thing people ever have to find. We’ve made our product intuitive to find other things too: pathways for other movies, for other days, more information, everything a moviegoer could want.

But what do cinemas want?

A website that treats their customers right; one that won’t break the bank and doesn’t take a decade off your life with stress and prolonged work. That shouldn’t be too much to ask, right?

Now we find ourselves on the other side of websites: admin. Keeping things up to date. Over the years of running Flicks, we’ve found as many techniques, tricks, and strategies as possible for keeping websites up to date. We’ve got a couple things up our sleeves, and we brought all of this with us for Your Cinema.

With a decade of experience guiding us, we aimed to make the cinema’s job of administrating a website as easy as possible. After all, it’s not just the moviegoer who could do with an easier time.

Take a cinema website’s key data, for example: showtimes and metadata. Showtimes and metadata—including poster images, synopses, and trailers—all feed through Your Cinema sites automatically. Cinemas program their showtimes and movies in Veezi and… well, their job’s all done. From there, it automatically appears on the website. No fuss.

Your Cinema is constantly updated as we learn more and more from feedback, from data, from everything we see. It’s a subscription service, and that means it’s not just a static solution. As we grow and learn, every improvement, every refinement, every detail we add comes to Your Cinema customers too.

At the time of writing, we have 120 sites live in 14 countries, and the response is amazing—everyone loves Your Cinema.