Eastern State

Pedrera provides Eastern State wide-ranging web services, including strategic consulting, ExpressionEngine development, web infrastructure administration and maintenance services.

Our Client

Eastern State is the home of America’s first penitentiary, located in the Fairmont neighborhood of Philadelphia. More than just a historic site, Eastern State offers a variety of tours, exhibits, programs, and other dynamic ways to engage with history and current issues of criminal justice. Through education, events, and workforce development programs, the Eastern State Center for Justice Education empowers people to think critically about America’s justice system.

The Challenge

Eastern State’s website is the primary interface for engaging with a wide variety of constituents: visitors to the historic penitentiary, educators looking for resources related to criminal justice, facility renters for events or movie productions – even visitors to the annual festival Halloween Nights. A key challenge for Eastern State’s website was to effectively serve this diverse group of website visitors.

How We Helped

Pedrera worked collaboratively with the team at Eastern State to conduct an in-depth analysis of their existing website, and to facilitate a discovery project that gathered requirements from internal stakeholders. This led to the creation of a completely revised information architecture, navigation and taxonomy system. Concurrently, Eastern State completed a rebranding project with a marketing agency. Pedrera applied the new branding to the website user interface system, and supported Eastern State in populating the website with new content. The result was a completely reimagined web experience for Eastern State visitors.

In addition to rebuilding the core website, Pedrera also addressed a complex retooling of Eastern State’s online ticketing system. In the past, two different systems were used for online ticketing. Admission to the historic site was handled with the platform Interactive Tickets, while the festival Halloween Nights used Ticketure. Users were forced to leave the Eastern State website to make purchases on unbranded, third-party websites. This was due to the complex, disparate requirements of each experience.

Pedrera was able to harmonize all ticketing purchases on a single platform, Ticketure. This was done by creating a custom application that made API calls to Tickterure. Now, users remain on the Eastern State website to complete their purchases. This allowed Eastern State to create purchasing workflows with special features like a color-coded pricing calendar for Halloween Nights, group rate purchases, parking addons, and promotion codes.

Pedrera continues to support Eastern State by developing new features, and ensuring the performance, security and reliability of their website.