Openbeatz Festival Page

[Philipp]

I have to show another ProcessWire while about 10 000 guest are entering the festival area. We've made this site exactly 125 days ago and while it's not our best page, it has some kind of interesting background story.

URL:

http://www.openbeatz.de/

This is a website for a german two-day electro festival. Some better-known DJs will be playing there and thousands of guest are expected (They hope to sell the ticket no 10000 this evening). The website features basic information pages, a DJ voting contest with FB integration and a overview of all ticket stores. It's build with ProcessWire 2.4 using FormBuilder and the AIOM module.

How we got started

Our existing client asked for a "small countdown page". They bought the "rights" of the festival and needed something quick to start the promotion. The problem? We didn't even had access to the domain but they printed the first batch of ads and flyers with the URL on it. The first mail came on Wednesday and the site should go online on friday. Don't we all love those kind of challenges...

As expected, the site requirements started to grow. We didn't had time for proper project management or any kind of planing. The whole site was build quick and dirty in under a week. We hired another coder to help us. The site is far from perfect, we know. It's hard to get the best results without proper communication and the lack of time. Anyway, the site was online and features were added quickly. 

The festival last year had about 2000 attendees. We saw the line up after we build the site and that was the point we realized, that our client had something bigger in mind...

The Domain

The domain was already printed on thousands of flyers when we first heard of the project. At that time, the old agency deleted the domains without a notice to us. We could get the open-beatz.de one but a domain shark got the name without the - . This stuff can get really expensive so we had to negotiate withe the new, unwanted domain holder. After some mails we got down from 5000€ to a smaller three-digit price. Lesson learned (and paid).

The DJ Voting

DJs could apply with a sample soundcloud set. The DJ with the most Votes (in form of FB likes) will play at the festival. The whole contest was embedded within a facebook application tab. The page had 406 DJs listed with a sum of around 11k likes. A DJ was represented with a PW pages were we counted the likes on that URI using the FB API. 

The contest is now hidden but you can see an example page here: www.openbeatz.de/dj-contest/wildchild/

The TV ad and numbers

You open Facebook and then you see the status "OpenBeatz TV ad in 5 minutes on RTL". Great, why did nobody tell us? The site was featured in multiple ads on the german RTL and RTL2 (larger) tv stations with the URL at the end. There were even ads at prime times like 19:00 and 20:00. 

Traffic peaked between 2000-4000 additional unique visitors after each clip. ProcessWire took it like a champ even without ProCache. For the stat nerds: 72% of those visitors in the time after the TV ads were on mobile.

In total we had an average of 1700 unique visitors every day with a peak of 11k visitors. The site was also shared on the artists facebook pages which brought another 1000 visitors within a 30 minute time frame.

What did we learn?

Plan ahead and communication. Make double tripple sure that your client tells you all the details and the size of the project. We started to small. If there is no time don't rush. If I could travel back in time, I would just delay that stupid countdown page for a week and plan a better version of the PW site.

Planning for the next OpenBeatz festival website will start in two weeks. Next time we will be prepared and launch a better site with lots of useful and cool features. Again, using ProcessWire Ideas are welcome.

One more thing: The whole site isn't a site on its own. It's just part of the Rocking High website using the Multisite module. But I thought a new thread in the showroom was appropriate.

Have a nice week end!