The Parkway Theater in Baltimore
Thoughts on the Baltimore Arts Website Experience
Homepages still do orientation work.
Government web guidance has a useful bluntness to it: people rarely read homepages the way organizations write them. Digital.gov's writing guidance treats headings, short paragraphs, descriptive links, and white space as wayfinding tools because readers are scanning for an answer, not settling in for the full story. Nielsen Norman Group gives that behavior a name, information scent: people follow the cues that seem most likely to lead somewhere useful.
For an arts organization, one of the strongest cues is simple: what's happening here this week?
We spent a week with seven Baltimore arts sites to see how each one answered. Some lead with programming. Others lead with something else. For three of them, we drew up a concept for what a different emphasis might look like.
What we looked at
Organizations whose core work is running a calendar: theaters, galleries, multi-use venues, and cultural centers. We set aside collection-driven museums and coordinator institutions; different business models ask different questions of a homepage.
We paid attention to information scent in practice: nav labels, link wording, supporting copy, and what the first viewport signaled about the site's content. If a first-time visitor had to guess where the calendar lived, or whether a visual block was clickable, we counted that against the page.
The first viewport is where the site and the stranger meet. What fills it is an editorial decision.
Two that lead with programming
Baltimore Center Stage fills the hero with its season, a dated artifact that is itself an event. Dated promo tiles follow below. "Plays & Events" is the first nav item. Ticketing lives on a branded domain. The site orbits what the organization does.
Current Space makes the same editorial choice at a smaller scale. Dated event cards sit in the first viewport. The /calendar page hands off to Withfriends for RSVPs.
Different scales, same instinct.
One that starts there
Maryland Art Place leads with Out of Order 2026 as the hero on desktop and mobile, a dated and specific program. The /events page takes a different shape, more landing hub than chronological listing, and the two layers don't quite speak the same language yet. The instinct at the top of the funnel is a strong foundation to build on.
Four that lead elsewhere
Baltimore Unity Hall keeps the calendar one click in
Baltimore Unity Hall opens with a welcome banner and venue imagery. A click through to "Calendar" lands on a clean, chronological events page with clear CTAs on every listing. The programming is one click in.
Unity Hall is newer to the scene, and the current homepage reads like the first pass at identity work. A later pass could bring the programming into the first view.
Le Mondo puts the membership pitch before the shows
Le Mondo opens with a membership pitch, carried in the cutout-collage language that makes Le Mondo feel like Le Mondo. Below the fold: the weekly calendar of theater, music, dance, and film that fills the venue.
We drew a concept that keeps the visual system intact, with orange, pink, turquoise, layered shapes, and display type, and moves a featured show, a ticket CTA, and the next three events into the first view. The membership ask sits below, where it follows the programming rather than precedes it.
Motor House gives the hero to a brand film
Motor House opens with a brand film, a well-produced three-minute YouTube embed. The "Upcoming Events" section lives directly below.
Our concept moves the film to a supporting page and brings upcoming events into the first view. The dark warm palette stays. The logomark stays. The film remains available for visitors who want it.
Eubie Blake states the mission before the work
Eubie Blake opens with a mission statement: "Bringing artists and audiences from diverse backgrounds together." We wondered what would happen if the mission were demonstrated in the first view rather than declared.
Our concept replaces the mission line with two pieces of current programming: the exhibition on view now on one side of the hero, the next few events on the other. The mission moves to a supporting role below. Navy and teal stay. The colorful Eubie Blake portrait mark, the strongest visual asset on the site, stays exactly where it is.
The pattern
Across the set, one thing stood out. Sites that open on programming give a stranger a reason to stay within the first view. Sites that open on identity, the mission, the story, the brand, ask the stranger to take that identity on trust before meeting the work.
That tradeoff gets sharper on mobile, where less context is visible at once. Nielsen Norman Group makes a related point in its guidance on mobile imagery: decorative images need to earn their keep. That's especially relevant for arts sites, where the first screen is often consumed by atmospheric venue imagery, faded background photography, or branding treatments that don't help a newcomer understand the current program.
Neither approach is automatically wrong. They're different editorial decisions about what belongs in the first view. For a calendar-driven organization, where the answer a visitor came for is what's on this week, opening on the programming puts that answer closest to the question.
These are redesigns, but not total reinventions. In all three concepts, we kept the logos, source material, and recognizable visual DNA. What shifts most is what the first view is for.
Frequently asked
Our hero video, photograph, or mission statement is central to our brand. Why might we move it?
The question is what the first view is currently asking a visitor to do. A hero that builds identity for an organization most visitors already know earns its placement. A hero that builds identity for an organization most visitors are meeting for the first time is a different calculation, and programming might earn it more. The video and the mission can sit a fold lower without disappearing.
Does this apply outside arts organizations?
The framing, what's happening this week, is arts-specific. The underlying question, what is the first view asking the visitor to do, isn't. Product companies ask it as "is the product visible above the fold." Service companies ask it as "is the value proposition specific enough to evaluate." Same logic, different nouns.
How expensive is a change like this?
Usually a focused homepage redesign, not a full-site overhaul. If events are structured cleanly in a CMS, the first view can be rewired in a week or two. If events live as manually-maintained images, the content model comes first. In most cases, the gap between current and ideal is closer to a week of work than a quarter.
In closing
Baltimore's arts scene is worth showing up for. The organizations in it do real work each week to make programming happen: curating, producing, community-building. Most of that work sits behind the homepage.
But the homepage is where that work first meets a stranger.
The strongest homepages show what the organization is doing. The rest follows from there.
If you run one of these organizations, or one like it in another city, or you see any of this differently, we'd like to hear from you.
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