All Puppet Players
Cleaning up a creative powerhouse’s digital stage
The Backstory
All Puppet Players has been a Phoenix mainstay for over a decade, putting on hilarious, boundary-pushing theatrical puppet shows you can’t find anywhere else. Shaun, the founder and creative director, had (to his credit) built the website himself.
And honestly, he did a solid job! As a regular theatergoer, I’d used it before to buy tickets without a hitch. The thing was, the site worked, but it could be working better. Ticketing represented the absolute bare minimum necessity for a website. But what else would benefit the company? I reached out to Shaun to see if he’d be open to a few improvements. He was ready to start immediately.
The Process
Listening First
Before suggesting any solutions, I wanted to understand how Shaun was currently using the site. I had him walk me through his process, which is on a seasonal cycle with his 4 shows per season. We also talked about his choice, years and years ago, to build his own website with Wix. To his credit, he had excellent foresight with his early choices. He picked the right platform for his needs and he was getting things done.
In listening, I noticed a pattern of repeating actions - Shaun was frequently duplicating or writing over his existing website. The way All Puppet Players was built within Wix made sense - it just needed a little more structure and attention to detail.
One of the small quality of life improvements we were able to make to the website was moving this warning about no admittance under 17 from the footer of every page to a pop up that only shows one time per site visit after 30 seconds have past, making for a nicer and more informative visit.
Finding the Fix
The big issue? Shaun was creating entirely new pages for every show and deleting old ones once the show closed. That approach not only hurt his SEO rankings but also meant a ton of repetitive work.
We decided to templatize the site. Unpacking what that means, we kept the same visual look and feel (which honestly fits the APP brand perfectly) but improved the layout on the screen to be responsive based on what kind of device a user was looking at the site with (like a phone or a laptop). Meanwhile behind the scenes we set up a CMS, a simple system that functions like a spreadsheet, that would serve as a source of truth for the website to create pages from in a structured and uniform way.
So now, instead of manually updating what shows are visible on the website by deleting and recreating content, Shaun just has to update a table and the rest is done for him!
This is part of the CMS structure that we updated the APP website to use instead of recreating individual pages. Every line in this table creates a new page on the website without extra work!
Building for the Future
Unpacking the new process to update the APP website unlocked a new type of thinking for Shaun that we were able to harness and expand the website with.
Making this update unlocked some real wins:
Show archive: For the first time ever, APP now has an archive of past shows. This is great for fans—and great for SEO. Now if someone searches for “Princess Bride puppets AZ,” they’re much more likely to land right on APP’s site.
Online store: APP sells merch at their shows, but hadn’t offered anything online. We fixed that. Now, they’ve got an e-commerce setup that adds a little passive income on dark nights.
Better mobile experience: While we didn’t redesign the site, streamlining layouts and navigation helped make it easier to use on phones - which is critical when your site doubles as your digital program.
Because of the updates we made to use a CMS for All Puppet Players’ shows, we had a slew of new data that used to just get deleted after the season finished. We used this to create an archive of past theater seasons!
The Outcome
Shaun was already great at using Wix and even taught me a few things. What we focused on was shifting the mindset: thinking about content in a way that worked with templates and systems, not against them. Through shifting that mindset we were able to evolve the website to add in a beautiful archive for all of APP’s side-splitting fourteen year run, and a web shopfront for merch. We built documentation around that idea and made sure he had a chance to practice updating things himself with me on standby to answer questions.
Now managing the APP website takes Shaun hours instead of days - giving precious time back to the creative process, and allowing more people to find this gem in the desert.
“I started an adults-only puppet company fifteen years ago. As wild as that sentence is, would you believe I was still using the same website I slapped together in 2010 to sell tickets a decade and a half later?
Every season I’d crank out four new shows. And every season, I’d lock myself in my office, putting off the dreaded “website rebuild” until the last possible second. My genius strategy? Delete everything from the year before and rebuild it from scratch. SEO? Never heard of her. Turns out, deleting my site history every season was like erasing my entire year after year.
Enter Brittany. First a fan, then my tech savior. She reached out and offered to help- explaining that not only could she make my website easier to update (no more Groundhog Day rebuilds), but she could also save my Google rankings from the digital graveyard.
What I didn’t realize was the very thing I hated most--rebuilding my site--was quietly killing my business anyway. Brittany blew my mind when she showed me how to streamline everything, create reusable templates, and actually build history online instead of erasing it.
Once she worked her magic, all my usual metrics shot up. My searches went through the roof. And the best part? She didn’t swoop in to be the gatekeeper of my site. Quite the opposite. She set me up, taught me how to run it myself, and made sure I didn’t need her holding my hand forever. For someone who despises endless subscriptions just to keep a business afloat, it was refreshing to work with someone whose goal was to leave me empowered.
Of course, when the occasional computer gremlin pops up, she’s always there. But what she’s done for my business overall? Incalculable. Would I recommend her? In a heartbeat. I’d also happily work with her again. She’s pleasant, kind, thoughtful, and never makes you feel dumb for not knowing something. She listens, she explains, and she makes sure you walk away with confidence instead of confusion. She fixed my website and helped my business. What more could you ask for?”
— Shaun McNamara, Creative Director of All Puppet Players