2024 artbeat website
the brief//
Design development of an event website for a 3-month arts festival on the Coromandel Peninsula, NZ.
background:
Creative Coromandel Trust advocates on behalf of the creative industries on the Coromandel Peninsula. In 2023 they started an annual 3 month arts festival across the whole region in spring. The aim is to invigorate local communities after the traumatic effects of several disasters like COVID and Cyclone Gabrielle.
The festival functions as an umbrella that ties together a multitude of independent artists’ events. It is free to participate and it enables local artists and groups to be part of a bigger picture, and have a wider reach in the promotion of their individual events. It benefits the region by increasing visitor spend. It further encourages communities across the region to identify as a whole, be promoted as a whole, and grow together stronger as a whole.
challenge:
Develop a stand-alone website that boldly shows off the event brand, identifies the festival, and promotes the key selling factors towards the target audience. A particular challenge was the historic fact that festival event listings and all event management software reside on a separate Creative Coromandel Trust website.
solution:
With the festival being in its second year, elaborate from the inaugural one-page website: improve user experience and add utility. Structure the website in separate pages and provide more information about the event. Include travel information, which was important after recent road closures due to extreme weather events.
Link across to event listings on the separate Trust website, but on that website group artbeat festival-related events together in a festival-branded, separate area. Treat this as an interim solution on the road to ultimately running a new event management software for all of Creative Coromandel and the artbeat festival. This will eventually allow both websites to jointly use one event management software with a shared database.
https://coromandelartbeat.nz/
