Case Study: Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival
Design & development of a WordPress website for the arts festival
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Overview
The Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival (CQAF) is an annual festival of music, comedy, theatre, art and literature held in May in Belfast since 2000.
Out To Lunch (OTL), an annual festival held in January, was launched in 2006.
I have been their web designer since 2001 creating approximately 40 festival websites to date (archived here: www.cqaf.com/archive/)
They required a website with a flexible CMS to promote multiple festivals and other activities throughout the year.
CQAF and OTL archive
Website Requirements
- a strong visual identity consistent with the CQAF brand
- Mobile first design with excellent user experience
- Easy for admin to add new content and edit existing content
- Ability to live-stream events
- Google Analytics set up and monitoring
- Maintaining high SEO ratings from old website
- Training for admin
UX Design
The User Experience objective was to make it as easy as possible for users to buy tickets online. This was achieved by having the option to buy tickets prominent on every page.
Page layouts were sketched, wireframes and hi-res designs were created before front-end development began.
A group of users were organised to test the website at wireframe, hi-res artwork and pre-launch stages and their recommendations were acted on.
Home page planning, sketch and wireframe
UI Design
The challenge was to design a layout that was user friendly and also easily adaptable to create new templates for future festivals.
The festival branding by Keith Connolly was used prominently and also dictated the website colours for each festival template.
Strict design rules were used to maintain a consistent style across all pages.
Mobile Design
According to Google Analytics, 69% of users were on mobile. A festival will have over 100 events with thumbnail images loading on the home page, which will affect page speed, data usage and page scrolling on mobile.
As there wasn’t much space to work with on mobile portrait view, I opted to remove the thumbnail altogether from portrait view but have it appear in landscape view. This resulted in a much quicker experience on mobile.
CQAF event page
Mobile layouts
Front-end Development
HTML/CSS
Clean, commented HTML was written then styled with CSS to create responsive webpages before being integrated into the CMS.
JavaScript
JavaScript was used to lazyload images to create faster loading pages.
SEO Audit
An SEO Audit was conducted and the website was optimised to reach a 96% score on SEO performance tests.
WordPress Development
WordPress’ use of page and post templates made it easy to create the multiple templates required for each new festival and a Plan Your Visit section.
I used the basic Underscores theme as the starter theme.
Advanced Custom Fields Pro
ACF was used to customise the admin area so admin users would have full control over adding and editing content.
The Repeater function was used in the Plan Your Visit section, where admin could add or remove venues, restaurants etc.
Optimisation
In order to comply with SEO optimisation recommendations, the plugins Autoptimise and Super Cache were used. This ensured HTML, CSS and JavaScript files were minified, images were optimised further and lazy-loaded and that pages were cached so they load quicker.
Security
The Wordfence plugin was installed for firewall and brute force protection. In addition, Updraft was used for scheduled backup of database and files.
CQAF22 festival website
OTL22 festival website
Standard page
Plan your visit section
Live-streaming
CO-VID cancelled the live shows in Out To Lunch 2021 however the festival was to be live-streamed. A cost effective live-streaming set-up was required to show the events.
CQAF’s online ticketing provider Ticketsolve adapted their software to display embedded html pages. This meant a YouTube video could be embedded into the page and could be scheduled to go live 15 minutes before the event.
The live streaming company Accidental Theatre provided the YouTube links and confirmation and reminder emails were sent through Ticketsolve.
The festival events had over 110,000 views.
OTL21 video archive
Training
Training was provided for admin staff in the form of video tutorials and step by step written instructions on the following:
- resizing, cropping and optimising images in Photopea
- add and edit events
- create content in the Plan Your visit section
Still from Resizing Images in Photopea video
Still from Adding Content to Plan Your Visit video
Result
Since the festival started selling tickets online 10 years ago, online tickets sales have grown every year and now account for 95% of all ticket sales.
There were 49,000 website visitors last year and a high bounce rate of 67% which suggests users are clicking “Buy Tickets” to take them to the external ticket kiosk.
