Challenge
The Calgary Folk Music Festival, with over 45 years of history, needed a modern, user-friendly website to tell its story while providing a seamless experience for its diverse audience. The festival’s previous site lacked flexibility for new content, wasn’t as accessible as it could be, and needed better alignment between storytelling, design, and ease of use. The goal was to create a site that would not only highlight the festival’s legacy but also provide enhanced functionality, such as custom event scheduling and real-time notifications, to better engage festival-goers.
Solution
Flipp Advertising redesigned the Calgary Folk Music Festival website with a focus on dynamic and intuitive user experience, providing both a visually engaging and functionally robust platform. Key components of the solution included:
User-Friendly Navigation: A streamlined layout allows visitors to easily access essential information, from event schedules and artist bios to ticketing and festival history, ensuring a hassle-free experience.
Dynamic Storytelling: The redesigned site showcases the festival’s 45-year history, combining past and present narratives with rich visuals and multimedia content to create an engaging visitor experience.
Custom Scheduling & Notifications: A standout feature is the custom event scheduling and push notifications, allowing users to create personalized schedules and receive real-time updates about their favourite performances. This functionality is delivered via a fast, responsive web application, making it simple for attendees to navigate the festival lineup and avoid missing their preferred bands.
Responsive Design & Accessibility: Optimized for both desktop and mobile devices, the site ensures a fully accessible experience for all users, regardless of device or ability.
Consistency with Flexibility: The blend of consistent design and flexible formatting enables the festival team to easily incorporate new types of content, ensuring the website adapts to the festival’s evolving needs.
Style Guidelines: Flipp developed clear graphic and writing style guidelines, ensuring a consistent visual and narrative voice throughout the website, further enhancing the festival’s brand presence.
Results
The new Calgary Folk Music Festival website delivered significant improvements:
Enhanced User Engagement: With the addition of custom scheduling and push notifications, users are more engaged, spending more time on the site and easily accessing the events and bands they’re most excited about.
Increased Content Flexibility: The festival team can now efficiently update the site with new events, artist information, and content, enabling a faster response to evolving needs and ongoing festival promotions.
Improved Mobile Accessibility: Optimizing the site for mobile use improved accessibility for over half of the festival’s audience, who now enjoy a seamless experience across all devices.
Faster Navigation to Favorite Bands: The custom scheduling feature allows festival-goers to quickly and easily navigate the lineup, enhancing their experience by ensuring they don’t miss their favorite performances.
Stronger Brand Cohesion: The introduction of graphic and writing style guidelines ensured the festival’s visual identity remained consistent across the site, reinforcing brand recognition.
Overall, the redesigned Calgary Folk Music Festival website delivered a dynamic, user-centric experience, seamlessly combining storytelling with functional features that enhance festival-goers’ engagement, while supporting the festival’s rich history and future growth.
