Little Giant has finished 2013 and kicked off 2014 with several new projects and more in the pipeline. Its first for the year is the revamped beerfestival.co.nz, a one page scrolling site developed in WordPress.
This year’s site is an iteration of the one developed last year that was based on new branding the agency introduced for the festival. Head of development Mike Little says the platform was familiar to the client and lets festival organisers update content themselves.
“They’re updating some sections, for example the scrolling section on food matches, they can change themselves,” he says. The site had more interactivity last year, but this year’s iteration is focused more on speed and simplicity, says Little, with ticket sales the ultimate aim.
“This year we decided to pull back a bit. We’ve done a number of optimisations that make it load faster. “My personal view is that everyone’s impatient, I know I am when I look at websites.”
Festival founder Andrew Somervell says the one page format was created to follow the information hierarchy analytics showed visitors to the site followed when it spanned several pages.
“We make constant iterations to the platform based on bands or brewers or foodies added to the lineup and we make pricing changes on the fly,” Somervell says.
He adds the site generally gets about 28,000 visitors and around 40,000 page views in the lead up to a festival. The festival kicked off in 2006 and Little Giant came on board in 2011.
The event will be held at the Cloud in Auckland in March. Little Giant also launched a new site for business social media firm Socialites shortly before Christmas, and has produced other new sites for hospitality organisation Good Group.
