Bloomsbury Festival

Brief: Create a website and interactive programme guide for the Bloomsbury Festival, a free cultural festival in central London.

Visit bloomsburyfestival.org.uk

Each year, the Bloomsbury Festival features hundreds of individual installations, exhibitions, tours and performances spread over three days in one square mile.

These events form the heart of the website. Visitors can browse by event type, day and venue. Visitors can also star individual events to build up a printable list of events which take their fancy.

For this project we developed a custom content management system (CMS) based on Zend Framework components. It has event geolocation built in which allowed us to dynamically place events on a map of the festival area. Using a special area of the CMS, event partners are able to update their own event information which has saved the small festival team many hours of tedious work.

After launching the site in 2010, we worked with the Bloomsbury Festival again in 2011 to add new functionality and make some usability improvements.

The site has been a great success, receiving thousands of hits per hour during the festival weekend.