Project Overview

Client: Festival Calendar UK
Sector: Events, Entertainment
MUT Roles: Conception, Design, Development
Project Time: 2 months

Festival Calendar UK is a calendar listing of upcoming festivals in the UK. Each festival listing opens a dedicated page providing users with essential information for that festival. Information includes tickets, accommodation, location, accessibility, and official links. It is possible to filter festivals by UK region, e.g. #Scotland, as well as by festival type, e.g. #Family.

Conception

The current Festival Calendar UK is a re-work of a previous website. The main lesson from this project has been keeping focus on a minimum viable product (mvp). The first iteration tried to serve the interests of too many user groups. It is important to start a project with a narrower scope and to iterate on top of that as appropriate.

Design

Inspired by the rich tapestry of the festival culture of the UK, Festival Calendar UK presents a calendar listing of the best upcoming festivals in the UK. Creating easy to navigate festival cards, opening to essential festival information, inviting users to discover good times!

Development

Built with Eleventy, hosted by Netlify. Optimised for performance and accessibility.

Challenges

In the UK over 50% of users access webpages via mobile devices (source). While mobile speeds are ever faster, website performance is still a huge issue. This fuelled the decision to build Festival Calendar UK using Eleventy, a static site generator. The main development challenge was updating the site so that past events would no longer appear in the listing. This was overcome by creating a collection which filters out festivals after today, and then scheduling nightly site builds via Netlify.

Future Development & Iterations

The current focus is to create the content, i.e. research and upload upcoming festivals. Website traffic is monitored to better understand visitor engagement. Future iterations are to include information for festival traders, blog articles, search functionality, social media linked accounts, featured festivals, visitor contact, and a festival equipment shop.

Current Site iframe

Competitive Analysis

https://www.thefestivalcalendar.co.uk/ is the top Google search site. The website claims to have over 2 million visits per month.

https://www.ukfestivalguides.com/calendar/ is a festival guide website specifically aimed at music festivals.