Britt Festivals Redesign and Expansion

Background

Britt Festivals' website was getting a little dusty. The design was 6 years old and they were ready for something new. Most website owners look to freshen things up every couple of years and Britt was also looking into adding interactive features to their already popular website.

Britt Festivals' Director of Marketing, Kelly Gonzales, saw opportunities to connect with their patrons through features that would allow them to contribute to the website and the user experience of other patrons. She wanted to add discussion forums, performance reviews and archives, interactive chat features, a blog, and the ability to slice all of this by interest group.

The decision to go forward was made in late December of 2007 and the new design needed to launch by March of 2008.

Getting Started

In January of 2008 we began the work of coming up with a new design. A couple of designers were involved, with many good options being presented. After weeks of effort to come up with a unique design that represented the Britt brand emphasis on performing arts and the outdoor, intimate setting of the venue, FizzBang Multimedia Design delivered the fresh, new design.

The next goal was to make the new design come to life with all of the wonderful content from the old web site as well as some new content and features.

Let's Build It!

With a new design in hand and little more than a month until the announcement of the season line-up, we worked closely with Britt's marketing department to start building the new website. The foundation of the website is our ContentJot CMS. ContentJot is easy to use with enough power and flexibility to handle the over 100 pages of content that needed to be published on the website. Sara King Cole, Britt Marketing Specialist, was able to get up and running very quickly and was able to manage the content development process entirely on her own with ContentJot.

Britt needed a lot more than a CMS, though. We had to add several features on top of the base ContentJot functionality in order to give Sara the tools she needed to manage a performance schedule with over 40 shows, an extensive in-site advertising engine, and complex website forms used by the education department. The site also had to be able to process ticket orders and membership contributions.

All of the website functionality is built with Ruby on Rails, a web programming framework that makes rapid development of complex database-backed website possible. ContentJot is built on Ruby on Rails also so we were able to easily extend it to include all of the additional functionality.

The Result

This was the first season the Britt patrons were able to interact with Britt staff and other patrons through the website using the new tools.

As the first season with the new website progressed it became clear that the new features were a hit. Many of the performances were rated using the new 5 star rating widget and several patrons contributed reviews to the shows they attended.

Britt patrons also engaged in lively discussions in the discussion forums and several attended the scheduled chats with artists performing this season. The Britt blog was active with a huge number of articles and good comments from readers.

After many long nights of effort on all parts, we were excited to launch the newly designed website in time for the Britt Festivals season announcement and to have so many of Britt's patrons enjoy the experience.

The day of the season announcement the website received over 35,000 page views by over 4,400 unique visitors. In the days since, the website has had nearly 100,000 unique visitors viewing over 700,000 pages. The site has also processed hundreds of membership enrollments. The launch went very well, the site was responsive during the heaviest times and post-launch glitches have been few.

Sara says, "Now that the site has been launched, the Content Management System has made my life so much easier in terms of managing the web site content."

Britt's Old Home page

The old performance detail page

The new home page

The new performance detail page

Britt Festivals' New Performance Detail Page