Developing a new hub for one of the largest festival in the nation.
THE BACKGROUND
Essence, one of the leading magazines for African-American women, had recently gone independent, and they needed to revamp their old festival website. They wanted to improve user experience while making the site easier to maintain for their internal team.
THE BACKGROUND
THE CHALLENGE
THE CHALLENGE
- An old festival site required migration to new owners.
- Required a design overhaul to improve usability and overall style.
- Content was difficult for non-developers in the marketing team to edit.
FEATURES + PROCESS
The first step is was a brainstorming meeting between CXR Agency and the Essence team. Then our team developed and designed the user interface and user experiential design based off of the brainstorming sessions.
The festival’s homepage along with a number of key subpages were reworked according to their specific type and function. The Essence festival site’s development was reestablished by using agile methodology and weekly scrums to ensure our targets were met on time.
An important priority for the team was to empower the Essence team to manage the site autonomously. We equipped them with a WordPress site along with a variety of short-code widgets to manage content easily.
To complete the process, CXR Agency transferred all of the pre-existing Essence festival site assets and migrated them into the new festival site. The Essence Festival hosts more than 400,000 attendees per year and their newly developed and designed website serves as the sole platform for festival schedules, ticket purchasing, sponsor information and more.
RESULT
A REFRESHED FESTIVAL WEBSITE FOR THEIR MASSIVE FESTIVAL
The migration went off without a hitch. There was no downtime for the website, no issues of corrupted or missing data and no SEO value lost from the migration. The Essence team saw improvements in their conversion paths and continues to work with CXR Agency for other projects.