Festival of World Cultures
Immersed in folk, traditional, eclectic, tribal, digital and the experimental, the D.L.R. County Council Festival of World Cultures presents a kaleidoscopic programme of concerts & club nights, fairs & markets, performances, street events and workshops.
StudioAad were awarded the contract to rebrand the Festival in 2009. Part of the design brief was the re-development of the festival’s website. StudioAad asked us to assist in the development of the new website based on their concepts and designs. We consulted very closely with StudioAad to ensure their designs met modern web standards. Further to this we prototyped all interactive aspects of the site to ensure everything worked as the client expected.
One of the main aspects of the website brief was to ensure that the website would facilitate the event for the forseeable future. We made a decision with StudioAad early on to use the Wordpress platform to build the site. Self-management of the site by festival staff and traditional blogging features were a fundamental requirement of the festival organisers and Wordpress was the ideal solution for these two key aspects of the brief.
The festival itself is an exciting and incredibly varied showcase of performing artists from around the world. The immense programme of events (almost 140 in total) needed to be presented in a very clear and concise way with a logical approach to the presentation of the individual event information. Further to this we needed to accommodate festival staff with an easy way to add, edit and delete events. By developing our own event management plug-in for Wordpress coupled with our own in-house CC-ImageJuggler Wordpress plug-in to handle image manipulation we were able to deliver this functionality on top of Wordpress.
Music is a key aspect of the festival and it was important to be able to present MP3 audio files easily and with an audio player. We used the jQuery Javascript framework to build an audio player that was 100% customisable. This allowed StudioAad to skin the player in-line with their carefully styled web designs.
On top of this we also included a blog to allow the festival organisers to communicate with their audience in a more personable way.
By combining a popular blogging platform with our own in-house plug-ins to handle events, audio and images and the high quality designs of StudioAad we delivered a fully functional website that satisfied all aspects of the brief within a development window of less than 2 weeks.
Screenshots
These screeshots were taken at the time of site launch, the site may have changed since then.
