Case study
Swanage Blues
A website for Swanage Blues, the charity music festival held at venues across Swanage, built so the festival team can update it themselves every year.
- Services provided
- Website design, Responsive design, CMS integration (Atlas CMS), UX/UI design
- Built
- 2015
The Challenge
Swanage Blues is a charity music festival that takes over venues across the town. A festival website has an unusual job: it can be quiet for much of the year, then has to answer a flood of questions at once. Visitors want to know who is playing, where, when and how to get in, and the answers change every year.
The festival is run by a small team rather than a web department, so the website had to be something they could update themselves, quickly, without waiting for a developer each time the line-up changed.
Our Approach
We designed the site around the questions festival-goers ask, and built it on a bespoke version of our Atlas CMS so the festival team can manage every page themselves. The main sections are:
- Line-up and artist information for each year’s festival
- Accommodation listings
- Tickets and venues pages, so visitors can plan their weekend
- Want to take part? for anyone who would like to get involved
- Media and a newsletter sign-up, with links to the festival’s social media
The layout is fully responsive, so it works on the phones most people use to check a programme while they are out and about.
The Results
Swanage Blues has a website the festival team can keep current on their own. Each year’s line-up and artist details are published by the festival itself, and the menu is labelled with the year, so visitors can see at a glance that they are looking at the right festival. Between festivals, the home page announces the dates of the next one and invites visitors to join the newsletter, so the website keeps working for the festival all year round.
Long-Term Impact
The Swanage Blues website has been in use since 2015 and is still online today but now but in newer form after the death of its founder. The new owners decided to take the website in-house rather than continue to use our previous website design.
If you are planning a website for an event, festival or charity, get in touch and tell us what you need.
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