5 Website Tips for Festival Organisers

When designing your website for your festival, here are 5 key things you must consider to get it right.

The number of festival visitors grew by over one million in the three years between 2012 and 2016, from 2.79 million to 3.9 million attendants. With this in mind, it is important to have an appropriate, responsive online space for these keen festival goers to interact with you and ultimately; buy tickets.

In addition to this, the live music and festivals market has a value of more than £2bn, and could rise as high as £3.5bn in 2020. The number of festivals listed on festival website eFestivals jumped from 496 in 2007 to 1,070 last year.

It is clearly a lucrative, growing and competitive market, full of potential opportunities. However, Steve Heap, chairman of the Event Industry Forum and general secretary of the Association of Festival Organisers, says the industry has been “swamped” with new festivals and a number go bankrupt each year, so how can you ensure that your festival stands out from the crowd and is a monetary success?

One way is to ensure that your website is working hard for you – building an audience, driving sales and sending a clear message about your offering.

From our experience building dynamic and robust festival websites for a number of clients, we’ve highlighted 5 top website tips that are essential for a successful event.

1) Social optimisation / integration (see your friends are going through facebook)

By integrating your website with social media, this will allow the seamless process of turning people that have purchased a ticket into advocates by enabling easy social sharing. Facebook utilise this themselves when showing events in people’s timelines. This word-of-mouth style of marketing latches on to the influence of friends. After all, according to Nielsen, 84% of consumers say that they completely or somewhat trust recommendations from Friends, Family Members and colleagues.

2) Line-up tool – easily editable / visual layout for agents

Line-ups can make or break an event. They are also likely to change and grow in the build-up, with new artist announcements key to your marketing strategy. We’ve designed and built an easily editable, fuss-free line-up tool that changes and evolves as your festival does.

3) Be Unique and Creative, Be Recognised

The most successful festivals are the ones that sell more than just their line-up, they sell an experience; one that is unique and memorable.

Your website should reinforce the experience you’re trying to sell, with creative and interactive elements that entice your audience and communicate a sense of occasion.

If you’re still trying to find creative and dynamic ways that communicate your festival experience and embodies your brand style and tone of voice, we can help with our Festival Launch Pad.

With a range of products available, from custom homepage design based on your objectives, to a dedicated workshop that will drill down into user flows and marketing objectives, we have a solution that fits your budget and timeframe.

4) Employ a Scalable Hosting Solution

We’ve probably all been on websites that have collapsed under the sheer demand for those limited ‘must have’ tickets. Traffic on festival websites may be relatively slow and steady for months, and then experience huge spikes in just a few hours.

You need a hosting solution that understands and can cater for massive spikes in traffic and not fall over during your most profitable times. We can help you find a flexible and scalable solution that will work for the entirety of your campaign.

5) Build Mobile First

It was back in November 2016 when mobile usage overtook desktop for the first time.

Mobile sites are no longer an afterthought, in fact, they should be the first thought when it comes to design and build.

Designing mobile first leads to a high-quality user experience for both environments. Remove potential obstacles to sign ups and sales but ensuring a responsive mobile website that is guaranteed to work on all modern devices and browsers.