Case Study: Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival

Overview

The Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival (CQAF), established in 2000, is an annual celebration of music, comedy, theatre, art and literature in Belfast. The Out To Lunch (OTL) festival, launched in 2006, takes place every January.

As the web designer for both festivals since 2001, I’ve developed approximately 40 festival websites to date (archived here: https://cqaf.com/archive/).

The project required a flexible CMS to effectively promote multiple festivals and activities year-round.

CQAF and OTL archive

Website Requirements

• A visually striking design aligned with the CQAF brand
• Mobile-first approach ensuring an optimal user experience
• Easy-to-use CMS for content updates and additions
• Live-streaming capability for events
• Google Analytics integration and ongoing monitoring
• Admin training for content management

UX Design

The goal was to simplify the ticket purchasing process. This was achieved by making the ticket purchase option highly visible on every page.

Page layouts were sketched, followed by wireframes and high-resolution designs before development began.

User testing was conducted at wireframe, design, and pre-launch stages, with feedback incorporated into the final product.

Home page planning, sketch and wireframe

UI Design

The challenge was to create a user-friendly layout that could easily adapt to multiple festival templates.

Festival branding was prominently featured, influencing the colour scheme for each festival template.

Strict design guidelines ensured consistency across all pages.

CQAF event page

Mobile Design

With 69% of users accessing the site via mobile (according to Google Analytics), I focused on optimising the experience, especially given the home page featured over 100 event thumbnails that could impact page speed, data usage, and scrolling.

To enhance performance on mobile portrait view, I removed the thumbnails, displaying them only in landscape mode, resulting in a faster, more efficient mobile experience.

Mobile layouts

Front-end Development

HTML/CSS

Clean, well-commented HTML was written and styled with CSS to create responsive pages, which were then integrated into the CMS.

JavaScript

JavaScript was implemented to lazy-load images, improving page load times.

SEO Audit

An SEO audit was performed, optimising the site to achieve a 96% score on SEO performance tests.

WordPress Development

WordPress page and post templates streamlined the creation of multiple templates for each festival and the "Plan Your Visit" section.

The Underscores theme served as the base theme.

Advanced Custom Fields Pro

ACF was used to customise the admin area, giving users full control over content management.

The Repeater function enabled easy addition and removal of venues, restaurants and other details in the "Plan Your Visit" section.

Optimisation

To meet SEO recommendations, Autoptimize and Super Cache plugins were used to minify HTML, CSS and JavaScript, optimise images, enable lazy loading and cache pages for faster load times.

Security

The Wordfence plugin was installed for firewall and brute force protection while Updraft was used for scheduled backup of database and files.

Live-streaming

Due to COVID-19, the Out To Lunch 2021 festival was live-streamed instead of holding in-person events. A cost-effective setup was needed to stream the festival.

CQAF’s ticketing platform, Ticketsolve, adapted its software to embed YouTube videos, allowing events to go live 15 minutes before the start time.

Accidental Theatre provided the YouTube links, and confirmation and reminder emails were sent via Ticketsolve.

The festival events had over 110,000 views on YouTube.

OTL21 video archive

Training

Admin staff received training through video tutorials and step-by-step written instructions covering:

• Resizing, cropping, and optimising images in Photopea
• Adding and editing events
• Creating content in the "Plan Your Visit" section

Still from Resizing Images in Photopea video

Still from Adding Content to Plan Your Visit video