The plan was to fix the Squarespace site.
Calgary Opera had been managing their digital presence in-house for years: a Squarespace site running alongside Tessitura TNEW, with the two systems largely independent of one another. Event listings updated manually. Patron memberships locked in Tessitura TNEW with no way to be promoted on the website, let alone shape what a subscriber saw on-site.
A full Squarespace overhaul wouldn't change any of that – not the manual overhead, not the data silos, and certainly not the inability to personalise the patron experience based on membership data. The problem wasn't the design. It was the platform.
So they made a different call.
A platform problem, not just a website problem
Before exploring what changed, it helps to understand what wasn't working, and why fixing the surface wouldn't have been enough.
Behind the scenes, the team was spending several hours a week keeping the website in sync with what Tessitura TNEW already knew. Every event update, every programme change, every pricing adjustment – all of it required manual intervention rather than flowing from the source of truth.
Sue Elliott, General Director & CEO, described the situation plainly: the team was managing the digital presence across multiple disconnected systems, with much of their time consumed by the kind of repetitive coordination work that exists only because the tools aren't talking to each other.
There was also a compliance dimension unique to Calgary Opera's operating context. Canadian federal law has required all-in pricing since 2023 – meaning total ticket costs must be shown upfront, consistently, across every production. On a manually maintained product set, enforcing that consistently added yet another layer of overhead.
The team knew all of this. What they hadn't yet landed on was a platform that could solve it.
The right decision at the right moment
Calgary Opera came to CultureSuite looking for a website platform purpose-built for arts and culture – one with a genuine Tessitura TNEW integration, and a design process that kept the team in control without the overhead of an agency relationship.
The timing turned out to be fortunate too. With a rebrand in motion through Daughter Creative, moving to CultureSuite first meant that new identity could arrive as a design layer on top of a platform already working properly, rather than triggering another full rebuild. Phase 1 was about getting the website foundation in place with CultureSuite. The visual evolution could follow.
Building in the room, not from a brief
The implementation followed CultureSuite's live design methodology: a series of workshops in which the Calgary Opera team made design decisions in real time, working directly with the platform rather than reviewing static deliverables weeks after the fact.
Daughter Creative was brought into the process early. Rather than presenting a finished website to a brand agency with a new identity already decided, the two teams worked alongside each other – giving Daughter Creative visibility of the platform's components from the outset, and giving Calgary Opera confidence that their rebrand wouldn't arrive as a disruption.
The decisions made in those sessions shaped the site meaningfully. The team chose list view as the default for 'What's On', with toggles to card and per-day views. Side filters over top filters on desktop. Distinctive colours for production pages rather than overlaid imagery. Each of these wasn't a template setting or a default, it was a deliberate call made by the Calgary Opera team who know their audiences best.
The production pages are a good example of the custom design work that's possible within CultureSuite CMS. Rather than a single template applied uniformly across the season, each production carries its own visual identity – colours, tone, and feel matched to the work itself. It's the kind of customisation that's easy to overlook from the outside, but makes a meaningful difference to how audiences experience the site.
The results
The new Calgary Opera website launched in March 2026 – phase 1 of a platform built to keep improving without a rebuild cycle to trigger the next round of investment.
On desktop, the performance improvements are measurable. Google Lighthouse scores moved from 71 to 86 for performance, and from 81 to a perfect 100 for best practices. Accessibility held strong at 94.
On the operational side, the Tessitura integration now means performance and event information flows from the source of truth rather than being manually maintained in parallel. The cost-explainer per production – a feature that surfaces all-in pricing clearly across the catalogue – keeps Calgary Opera compliant with Canadian federal law without requiring manual policing of every listing.
And for the first time, patron memberships held in Tessitura can inform what subscribers see on-site. That audience development lever – explicitly named as a project goal from the outset – is now available to use.
Sue Elliott, General Director & CEO of Calgary Opera, reflects on what the platform has delivered:
"CultureSuite CMS has achieved the right balance of inspired and inspiring: Calgary Opera site visitors benefit from streamlined and personalised journeys, and our team members spend more time on value-added customer service and audience development. We're thrilled to introduce CultureSuite to Canada with this partnership...welcome and bienvenue!"
What Calgary Opera's story tells the wider sector
This isn't a story about a website being fixed. It's a story about a strategic decision made at a particular moment. One that avoided a rebuild cycle, accommodated a rebrand without disruption, and landed Calgary Opera on a website platform that improves with every release.
The manual overhead, the compliance complexity, the untapped personalisation potential: none of those were failures of the Calgary Opera team. They were the predictable consequences of trying to make a general-purpose CMS do work it was never designed for.
CultureSuite CMS removes that friction. What the team does with the time that frees up is the part that matters – and for Calgary Opera, that means more focus on the audiences they exist to serve.
Your website shouldn't cost your team half their week.
Stop letting disconnected systems eat your team's time. There's a better way to run your digital presence.
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