Ticket Omaha is the official ticket retailer for the Orpheum Theater, the Holland Performing Arts Center, and select Steelhouse Omaha shows, serving four different arts organisations: Omaha Performing Arts, Omaha Symphony, Opera Omaha, and Omaha Community Playhouse. One site, one search bar, one purchase path, four completely different programmes.
That's not a small design challenge. It's the kind of structural knot that ticketing consortiums across the sector live with: shared infrastructure, distinct identities, and a homepage that has to do the work of four box offices at once.
Ticket Omaha's own patrons said as much: "Information is in a lot of places and can be confusing," read one survey response. Session recordings backed it up, with visitors clicking into the purchase flow just to check who was actually presenting a show, then bouncing back out again.
72% of Ticket Omaha's traffic was mobile, and the previous build wasn't just under-serving that audience, it was actively working against them. "Show More Events" reset users to the top of the page. Pricing sat behind a click-through wall. Subscription pages timed out and had to be refreshed and re-clicked before they'd load at all.
Exactly the complexity CultureSuite CMS was built for
CultureSuite CMS is designed around exactly this kind of complexity – multiple programmes, one platform, no rebuild every time priorities shift. For Ticket Omaha, that meant:
Tessitura-aware by design
Dynamic on-sale states read directly from Tessitura's Modes of Sale, so buttons update in real time between "On sale soon," "Sold out," and "Buy tickets" as a configuration changes, with no manual page edits required. A TNEW event updater brings show data into the CMS without re-entry, and a bulk group-creation tool now removes the weekly task of setting up Tessitura pre-sale and on-sale groups by hand.
Genre- and theme-led navigation
Heatmaps from the previous site showed heavy use of genre filters and almost none on venue. Visitors think in terms of "what show," not "which building." The new structure follows that instinct rather than fighting it.
Automated Tessitura (TNEW) event updater
Tessitura event data flows into CultureSuite CMS without manual re-entry, and a bulk group-creation customisation removes the weekly manual work of setting up Tessitura pre-sale and on-sale groups.
Cross-populated content
Whether it’s for parking, dining, and accessibility information, cross-populated content enables the Ticket Omaha team to publish these details across venue pages, event pages, and Plan Your Visit pages more easily – instead of forcing visitors to hunt for the same details in three different places.
A mobile-first rebuild
Fixed pagination, clearer touch targets, and ticket pricing surfaced before the purchase flow rather than behind it.
What's changed
The clearest evidence is in the Lighthouse scores, tested before and after launch:
Mobile matters most here, given three-quarters of visitors arrive on a phone: Performance doubled and Best Practices rose 35%. Desktop moved just as far, up 102% on Performance and 30% on Best Practices. Gains on this scale usually only come from a dedicated technical rebuild.
For Ticket Omaha, moving onto CultureSuite CMS was just the starting point: every update since has kept performance and usability moving in the same direction, without another rebuild ever needing to happen.
On the ground, the change was more straightforward than any chart can show: "No patron issues reported upon launch," and feedback on the new site's look and feel was positive from the outset.
"Before CultureSuite, keeping the site running was a job in itself – rebuilding sales groups by hand, and manually updating pages every time a show's status changed. Now sales groups and scheduling are automated, and our team spends more of that saved time on the audience instead of the back end. We still build and edit the pages ourselves, but the manual busywork around them is gone. It's made a real difference in how we run the site day to day.”
Emily Singer, Digital Marketing Manager, Omaha Performing Arts
Beyond the launch
The relationship didn't end at go-live. Every show Ticket Omaha sells starts life as a listing in Tessitura, their ticketing system. That data used to flow into the website exactly as it sat in Tessitura, all bundled into one broad field that could just as easily contain a stray image link as the actual show description, so pages often needed manual tidying up before they were ready to publish.
Ticket Omaha worked with the CultureSuite product team to build a cleaner way of pulling that same data through, so production pages now arrive already formatted and ready to go, with far less manual cleanup. That improvement has since been rolled out to every venue using CultureSuite CMS, not just Ticket Omaha.
It's the same story with the roadmap more broadly. The Content Library for shared blocks like "Know Before You Go," and a bulk pre-sale/on-sale group creation tool for Tessitura clients, both started as requests from Ticket Omaha and are becoming standard capabilities every CultureSuite venue can use.
That's the difference between a CMS built for one client and a Community-driven one: one organisation's feedback becomes every other venue's feature, at no extra cost to any of them.
"What stood out most isn't the launch. It's everything since. CultureSuite has kept building with us, taking our feedback straight into the roadmap. It doesn't feel like a typical vendor relationship. It feels like we're building this together."
Ashley Voorhees, Vice President of Patron Services, Omaha Performing Arts
The bigger picture
Ticket Omaha's brief was never going to be simple: four organisations, one ticketing hub serving multiple venues, and a majority-mobile audience the old site was actively working against. What's changed isn't just a faster page or a tidier menu. It's a platform that treated a consortium's complexity as the starting point rather than an edge case, and a suggestion from one venue's team that's now shaping how every Tessitura-integrated organisation on CultureSuite CMS manages its production data.
That's the throughline for every CultureSuite Community member, not just Ticket Omaha: the website platform gets better because venues use it and influence it, not because they wait for the next rebuild.
See what a Community-driven CMS can do for you
Ticket Omaha went from a site fighting its own mobile audience to one shaped by the people who actually use it every day.
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