Why your theatre company's website is always out of date — and how to fix it

Go and look at your company's website right now. There's a fair chance the homepage still features the show you closed last season, the audition dates are last year's, and the cast list for the current production never made it up at all.

This isn't a competence problem, and it certainly isn't laziness. It's structural. Keeping a separate website current is a real, ongoing job — and in a volunteer company, it's nobody's job in particular. So it falls to whoever feels guiltiest, gets done in bursts, and drifts out of date the moment that person gets busy with the actual show.

The reason it drifts is worth naming, because it points straight at the fix.

The real problem: your website is a second source of truth

You already keep your production information somewhere — auditions, rehearsal dates, the cast, the show details. Then your website asks you to enter all of it again, by hand, in a second place. Two copies of the same information means two things to keep in sync, and the second copy — the public one — is always the one that slips.

Every "the website's wrong again" is really a double-data-entry problem wearing a different hat.

The fix: a website that reads from what you already keep

This is the thinking behind Presence, Prompter's public-website module. Instead of being a separate site you maintain alongside your production work, your Presence site is generated from that work. It lives at your own address — yourcompany.get-prompter.app — and it renders live from your data: the auditions you've set up, your show pages, your cast and character lists, your news. You don't copy anything across. You run your production in Prompter, and the public site already reflects it.

It also keeps pace with where a production is, not just what's in it. As a show moves through its phases — planning, auditions, performance — the public site reveals the right thing at the right time on its own: a quiet "coming soon" while you're still planning, the audition sign-up the moment auditions open, show and ticket details once you're on sale. You're never editing a web page. You're advancing your production, and the site keeps up.

Set your company's details once — name, tagline, the bit about who you are, your socials, a hero image — and they carry across the whole thing.

The honest trade-off

A self-updating site isn't the right call for everyone, so here's the fair version. A standalone site builder like Wix or Squarespace gives you total design freedom and isn't tied to any other tool — if you want a fully bespoke look, or a site that does things unrelated to your productions, that freedom is real and Presence doesn't try to match it. Presence is more templated, and it's exactly as current as your production data: its strength is that it mirrors Prompter, and that's also its boundary — it's a theatre-company site, not a general-purpose website builder.

For most community companies, that's a trade worth making: you give up some design latitude, and in return you get a website that is never out of date and that nobody has to remember to update.

Put it on your own address

By default your Presence site lives at yourcompany.get-prompter.app, and that works from the moment you switch Presence on — no setup, no cost. On Produce+, you can connect a domain you already own — yourcompany.org.nz, or whatever your company's address is — so the public site lives on your own brand instead. You add a couple of DNS records at your registrar (Prompter shows you exactly which ones, ready to copy), and once they take effect the site goes live there with HTTPS handled for you. The get-prompter.app address keeps working too; your own domain simply becomes the main one people see.

The point

Your website was never meant to be a chore on someone's list. It was meant to be the public face of your company — the first thing a prospective member, audience member, or sponsor sees. When it keeps itself current, it can actually do that job, and you get your volunteers' evenings back for the work that matters: the show itself.