Event sites are a category to themselves. An event's brand has to be exciting and obvious, and everything has to push to commerce. And since time is of the essence — after all, when the event is over, so is the need for the site — constant content updates are crucial.
Grammy Award winner CeCe Winans called to ask us to design the site for Always Sisters, Forever Brothers, a three-day Nashville conference and concert that seeks to teach and motivate teens in their Christian faith. Urgency was the word of the day, because they had already hired and parted ways with a previous design firm.
Design
The client provided the event logo and color palette, and wanted the site's typography and style to borrow from that art. We took that base art and created a sidebar Flash file that appears on every page of the site.
The client also felt that the speakers and musicians had to be the central message for the event. To get the photos to the site as soon as new talent was booked, we used the integrated photo gallery software in the Generator cms platform. Once the lineup was set, we created a Flash slideshow with a Register button that takes the customer directy to our Ticket Force box office.
Site functions
The site used many of the unique features of our content management system, including:
- Photo galleries
- Message boards
- Flash
- Membership
- Forms
- Email list signup
- Invisible pages
- Search engine optimization
- Password protected pages
- Link pages
Ticketing
Speaking of ticketing, Sharing the Vision relied on Generator to set up their ticketing services through our event partner, Ticket Force. We worked with the client to acquire a seating chart for Belmont University's Curb Event Center, strategized the best way to market the conference and concert tickets (general admission, VIP and reserved seating), and got seats on sale in less than a month.
Email
Fortunately, the client had several email lists from their 2006 and 2007 Always Sisters events. We cleaned the lists, set up new mailing lists at their site, posted them in their Generator Email List admin, and they were ready to go. With our simple but powerful admin interface, CeCe's staff was immediately off to the races, blasting out mail and getting sales numbers rolling.