Website
Festival websites come with their own, unique criteria. The goal of the festival website is to provide a smooth and enjoyable experience for attendees, from the moment they book their tickets to when they’re looking back on their memories of the event. So a good festival website needs to consider quite a lot.
Narrative came on board to help get that under control. As well as helping to structure the content, provide a more coherent design, and make it easier to manage going forward, we also provided an events listings system that made it much easier to manage, displayed events in a more sensible chronological manner, and took bookings with the option to sell tickets.
Events Listings & Ticket Sales
Dynamic Content: Festival websites need to handle a lot of dynamic content that changes from year to year, or even day to day as the festival approaches and occurs. This includes the lineup, schedule, ticket availability, and more. The website design needed to accommodate these changes without requiring a complete overhaul each year.
Event Scheduling: The festival’s program needed to be listed in chronological order, with the upcoming events at the top. This required a dynamic scheduling system that automatically updates as time passes. This makes it easy for users to find (and book) events by date, time, or category.
Ticket Sales and Booking Confirmation: The website should have a secure and user-friendly system for ticket sales. This includes the ability to select specific events, choose ticket quantities, and make payments. After a successful purchase, the system should send a booking confirmation email to the user. This email could include a .ICS file or similar so that attendees can easily add the event to their personal calendars.
Greater Control
Real-Time Updates: During the Book festival, the website needed to provide real-time updates for things like schedule changes, & emergency information. The design included areas to prominently display these updates so that attendees can easily see them.
Interactive Map: This year, most events took place at one venue but, historically, BookTastic Book Festival has taken place over a large area with multiple venues. The events listings feature interactive google maps to show the locations of different events and other important locations.
Post-Festival Content: After the festival, the website is used share photos, videos, and recaps of the event. This helps keep the festival fresh in attendees’ minds and build excitement for the next year.
Narrative provided a fully functioning bookings system that can list events in chronological order, with the ability for attendees to add events to their personal calendars, send booking confirmation emails, and automatically keeps the current listings up to date, saving hours of work for the volunteers.
Booktastic Children’s Book Festival Website
BookTastic is the children’s book festival. It started in 2014 as a small community project in Bedford, and has grown into an annual event with hundreds of children attending, and thousands more watching the streamed events online.
Amongst the various events is “Schools’ Week” – 5 days of the UK’s top children’s authors & illustrators entertaining & inspiring children about the magic of books. It’s a fabulous event and we’re very proud to be part of it.
Like many community events, BookTastic Children’s Book Festival is run by volunteers in their spare time. Starting-out in 2014 with a basic, free website, it became harder to manage the content & events listings as the event grew. Previous events were being deleted (not great for SEO) and there was no way to take payments for tickets or streaming licenses, which limited the Book Festival’s ability to generate income & become self-sustainable.
They had been doing everything manually & creating individual pages for each event. It “worked” but was time consuming, and unhelpful for users as they did not display in chronological order. People trying to book would have to email, then wait for a reply.