As one of the country’s top foodie destinations, Charleston’s Wine + Food Festival is a highly revered and widely attended event (2018 saw nearly 30,000 attendees). The festival captures Charleston’s upscale and progressive restaurant scene, but the past website designs did not reflect this. In 2017, we helped the nonprofit relaunch their website and have continued to work with them year-round, constantly updating the site to fit the sales cycle from pre-sale to ticket launch to week of festival.
1,000,000 users
Visited The Site Between The August Launch And The March Festival During The 2018 Season
Services
Web Design
Poor hosting and heavy traffic meant the old site kept crashing, which hindered ticket sales and devalued the experience. In order to stabilize the new site, we implemented site monitoring, alleviating any further problems. We built the custom design on WordPress, a platform the internal CWFF team are comfortable updating themselves, a key component as there are constant changes to events, sponsors, locations, chefs, etc.
The Culinary Village
The Charleston Wine + Food’s largest event is the 3 day Culinary Village, offering tastings, demos, live music, retail and more. We designed a microsite to support this large-scale event, the highlight of which is an interactive map. By creating a polygon around each location on the map, we used an image mapping tool to discover the coordinates, creating a hover state for each area that leads to an individual page offering more information on that particular spot or event.
A Dynamic Website
The Charleston Wine + Food website is the nonprofit’s fundamental tool for communication, marketing and sales. Updated regularly, it is where users find out information about the upcoming festival, purchase tickets, locate events, get involved and much more. We designed a UX to house a matrix of information in an intuitive and streamlined sitemap. We integrated SquadUp, a complex ticketing platform, while simplifying the event schedule to make it very easy for users to dig deep into events and purchase tickets. Keeping the customer front of mind, we added a personal level to the experience by allowing users to “favorite” particular events and implementing site chat, key to expediting the check out process for limited ticket events.