# Building a website for a festival or arts organisation

> The dates for a festival are agreed long before anyone looks at the website, and they do not move for it.

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Arts Building a website for a festival or arts organisation
The dates for a festival are agreed long before anyone looks at the website, and they do not move for it.
6 min Reviewed July 2026 Dave Curtin / Founder and creative director
The dates for a festival are agreed long before anyone looks at the website, and they do not move for it. The programme goes public on a set morning whether or not the site is ready. We have built for Kerry Film Festival and Limerick Arts Festival, and that work differs from an ordinary redesign because most of the pressure lands inside about six weeks.
01 The site does a different job in every season
For an autumn festival, the first half of the year is quiet, and the visitors are funders checking that you are still operating, artists looking for a submission deadline, and the occasional programmer doing background reading. What matters then is that the organisation looks like it has a future and that last year's work is still findable.
Then the programme goes live, and that morning usually brings the highest traffic of the year, most of it from social posts and press coverage, nearly all on phones. People want the lineup quickly, and to find the two or three things they might book. If the programme is slow or hard to scan on a phone, you lose bookings and never hear about them.
During festival week the behaviour changes again, and people are checking what is on tonight, how to reach a venue they have never visited, and whether a show has sold out. Then it ends, and for a fortnight the site is documentation: photographs, a wrap-up for sponsors, evidence for the funder report. Most festivals handle that part badly, because nobody has energy left by then.
02 Build the programme as data rather than as pages
Nearly every website problem a festival has comes back to how the programme is stored. One record per event with proper fields works: title, artist, date and time, venue, running time, price, age guidance, image and credit, ticket link, category and access notes. Defining that takes an afternoon nobody enjoys, and the filtering, the archive and the print export all read from those fields.
With that structure you can filter by day, venue and art form, and run a page showing what is on in the next two hours. Sold out becomes a flag you tick once, and it appears everywhere it should. The printable programme, the listings feed for local media and the social copy all come off the same record.
Without it, someone builds sixty pages by hand and edits them under pressure. A festival makes dozens of changes in the final fortnight, and each one is a chance for a wrong ticket link, or a venue corrected in one place and not another. Brainstorm, our Irish practice, established in Limerick in 2010, has a fuller account of how we handle programmes, seasons and venue listings .
03 Planning for announcement day
Traffic on announcement day arrives in a burst over about two hours and then falls away, so the site must be quick when it is hit and can be modest the rest of the year. Static hosting with a cache in front costs very little and handles that comfortably. We usually walk the morning through with the client about a week ahead.
Publishing should be scheduled rather than manual, because someone will be driving or standing on a stage when the embargo lifts, which is how an 11am announcement goes out at 11:40. Press want preview links a week ahead. Check the share image and the page title early, since that card is what most people see before they reach the site.
Keep the launch of a new site and the programme announcement about two weeks apart if you can. Doing both on the one morning turns any problem into two, with nobody sure which caused which. We would rather go live quietly in a slow month, let the site settle, and then load the programme into something already proven.
04 Do not build your own ticketing
We spend part of most festival conversations talking clients out of building their own ticketing. The platforms handle payment, refunds, scanning at the door, card security and the phone call at eight in the evening from someone who cannot find their booking. Building that yourself costs more than your whole website, and it needs maintaining every year afterwards.
The handover between the two is worth paying for, so each event should link straight to its page on the ticketing platform rather than dropping people at a generic box office page. Prices belong on your page rather than two clicks away. If the platform allows any styling, an hour spent matching colours and logo makes the jump feel like one organisation.
Two situations are real exceptions: festivals selling passes rather than single tickets often need something the standard platforms handle awkwardly, and a venue with its own box office may need the site to read live availability. That is integration work, and it should be quoted separately and honestly rather than folded into a website price as a small extra.
05 What funders and sponsors need to find
Public funders and sponsors have requirements that are easy to miss and awkward to fix late: acknowledgement logos in the correct form, the exact wording a grant scheme asks for, a visible governance page, published annual reports. None of it is hard, but it needs a place in the design from the start rather than a row of logos jammed into the footer before an audit.
Accessibility is increasingly a condition of funding, and worth doing on its own merits: colour contrast, keyboard navigation, real text instead of words baked into images, captions on video. The same applies to language, since describing an event so that someone outside the art form knows what it is takes work, and it is worth doing before the design starts .
Keep past editions online at stable addresses, because when you write the next application, the evidence that you have run a fifteen year programme with named artists and real audiences is the archive itself. Sites rebuilt from scratch every second year lose that history, and reconstructing it later costs far more than keeping it would have.
06 The admin should suit the person who uses it
In August the site is usually updated by one person who has four other jobs that week, and that should shape the admin more than any design preference. Fields in the order a human would fill them, plain labels, no hidden settings that quietly break a layout, and separate logins so a volunteer cannot unpublish the homepage.
We record a screen share of the person who will actually do the updates while they do them, and we write one page of instructions covering the tasks that recur every year. It is short enough that a new coordinator will read it, which matters, because long manuals do not survive a change of staff.
Volunteers writing copy is normal, provided the admin makes it hard to go wrong: character guidance on a short description, a required image with a credit field, a preview of how the listing will look. Someone will eventually paste four hundred words of press release into a space designed for forty, and a constraint built into the form handles that better than an instruction.
07 What the money buys, and what you can do this week
For a festival site with a programme system, an events archive, funder and sponsor sections and an admin designed for the person who uses it, our projects generally land between CA$12,000 and CA$30,000, with smaller pieces of work starting around CA$5,000. Ten to sixteen weeks is normal. The sensible time to start is the month after this year's festival closes.
You can do some of this yourself before talking to anyone. Open a spreadsheet and write out every field an event needs, then fill it in for last year's programme, which teaches you more about your own content than a workshop would. Look at analytics for announcement day and festival week rather than the annual average, and click every ticket link on the current site.
If your programme is stable and the current site works, the honest answer may be that photography and better listings would do more this year than a redesign, and we say that fairly often. Where a site really is holding a festival back, it shows up as staff hours lost every August, and that is the number to weigh against any quote we give.
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Related case Kerry Film Festival Related engagement Website Design
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