Calgary Folk Music Festival

In the summer of 2003 I went to the Calgary Folk Festival and found that the music was far more varied than just folk, that it was a wonderful little village community and country fair for four summer days, and that their website was a bit hard to use.  I volunteered to help out with the site. That evolved into having my company Karo Group redesign and rebuild the site as a sponsor, and in the spring of of 2004 we launched an easy-to-use content management system (CMS). Since then I've helped with four redesigns, a new, more flexible CMS, a lot of new functionality, content planning and any website questions or problems. 

This pro bono work was originally done through my former company, Karo Group, and more recently with a small, talented team of web volunteers, including Dan Meeking, Jamie Totten and Benny Lin. It is now handled by Signal alone.

• The Folk Festival is fun to work with because music... and beacuse of the people who work there and love music!
• The Folk Festival is challenging to work with because their website visitors need a lot of information presented quickly and clearly, and all that information needs to be added by staff to databases behind the website, quickly and clearly. 
• The Folk Festival is scary to work with because the website gets very busy in season, and failure is not an option.  
• The Folk Festival is a dream to work with because making complex things as fast and simple as possible is interesting and satisfying. 

The site includes many custom functions and databases for managing and displaying summer and winter festivals; artist listings and archives; festival schedules with multiple days, stages and performances; personal festival schedules; home page event feeds; year-round event schedules; sponsor recognition; home page highlight links; and songwriting contest entries.

Festival staff manage most of the content updates themselves, with support from Signal. We help wherever we can. I have worked with the Folk Festival as a sponsor since 2004.

Scope of work —

• project management
• design
• website content planning
• content production
• proofing
• website and database development
• imaging
• user support, documentation, and training
• ongoing support
• Silverstripe CMS
• Golive API integration