A decade of expansion has seen St. Jerome’s Laneway Festival become an international signifier of essential music, championing community, fostering collaboration, and encouraging self-expression.
Olive Tree, part of the 2020 Laneway Festival line-up
Earl Sweatshirt, part of the 2020 Laneway Festival line-up
Problem: A six-city festival with annually changing artwork and brand elements. Heavy website traffic spikes. A variety of page template needs.
I’ve worked with Laneway Festival for over 10 years, taking care of their websites and server solutions for 7+ cities through various incarnations. Our previous website solution had been in place for over 5 years, requiring very little maintenance, but the time had come for a redesign and upgrade.
The festival revises their seasonal artwork and brand elements each year using a feature artist, but requires the website lifespan to roll through many years. Many website page variations are also needed to differentiate content, from artist line-up pages, to news, information and history.
Traffic spikes are driven by media announcements, often via radio and social media. Announcements direct surges of traffic at the website and servers throughout the festival lifecycle.
The city home pages feature large typographic line-ups, with an image-modal hover effect.
Solution: A bold, typographic, image and colour-based interface. Re-usable, elemental content blocks. Silverstripe CMS, AWS and Cloudflare combo.
On the website landing page, users are prompted to select one of the six festival cities to view unique content, personalised to that location. The interface includes a dismissible banner with a “buy tickets” link, serving both user and business needs. The website theme, including brand elements and colour scheme, is quickly editable via the Silverstripe CMS, extending the life of the website solution beyond a single season.
Many users switch between the city subsites — some attending multiple festival locations. For these use-cases, a prominent city-switcher element is included in the main navigation/top app bar of the website. On mobile devices, users can navigate pages, subscribe, view social links, and buy tickets via a navigation side-drawer.
Elemental, movable blocks
The website design process uses an elemental approach that integrates with Silverstripe CMS’ V4 elemental blocks. Content is divided into reusable sections: Title blocks, image blocks, slider blocks, video blocks, text blocks, accordion blocks, grid item blocks, scrolling marquee blocks (old school!), etc. These reusable blocks give the client creative flexibility to build and edit pages with endless variation.
Bold artist pages with media embeds
The line-up item (artist) page template uses a scrollable split-screen on desktop, with a prominent image, large typographic title, and social links above-the-fold (if you believe in that stuff).
Each artist has a Youtube and Spotify embed for punters to listen and make decisions about which acts they’ll want to catch at the festival.
