Using Umbraco 8, Illumi built a brand new platform for Aarhus Festuge (eng. Aarhus Festival), one of the largest and oldest cultural festivals in the Nordic countries. The end result is a vibrant, user-intuitive and especially mobile-friendly solution. What led to the success? Illumi is sharing the full story:
Skills used
- Design
- Headless CMS
- Mobile
Sector
- Arts & culture
Partner doing the case
- Company:ILLUMI
- Website: www.illumi.dk
- Type: Gold Partner
Friendly for site visitors and editors alike
Our main goal was to give Aarhus Festuge’s site visitors both a dynamic and vibrant experience but above all a stable platform that can handle the heavy load that hits the site in the weeks leading up to and during the festival week itself.
Let’s not forget the site editors though. With the upgraded editor experience in Umbraco 8, we saw that we could get a platform that, with its smooth workflow, is pure editor-happiness.
Website and app - as one
To make Aarhus Festuge’s website as accessible as possible from mobile devices, we have built the new Umbraco 8 solution as a Progressive Web App (PWA).
A PWA is a mobile view of the site that is reminiscent of what we know from a traditional native app and it typically has both the splash screen and desktop icon, which helps to give a real app feel.
A PWA can be installed, so you can also potentially use it when you are offline, and you do not have to constantly update because the PWA automatically downloads the latest version when you are online.
In the past, Aarhus Festuge had a traditional native app that needed to be maintained alongside the site.
Now the app and website are one solution, which is both easier and less flawed to maintain.
What’s more, we built Aarhus Festuge as a headless CMS solution, which made it a good basis for quickly getting the content out into new channels and on new types of devices.
How does it work? In a headless solution, we convert CMS to a data container and build display templates specifically for the various devices to display the content. Precisely because the frontend and backend are separated, we can quickly build content views for new devices without having to root in the source codes for yet another solution.
“It has become much easier for the editors to navigate the backend. We have over the years worked up different needs to be able to access information, compile content in special ways or create an overview of data, and with Umbraco 8 it has been put in a system that suits us much better.”
The cherry (ies) on top
Along with the new solid technical platform, we have also introduced a number of UI enhancements as well as some improvements to displaying images and video on the site, which equipped the site with a much more visual expression.
Imagine that the event you are at is nearing the end date, but that you are in no way feeling ready to go home… Previously only available on the app, Aarhus Festuge site can now show you which events are held immediately near your location and within a given time interval, regardless of the device you’re browsing on.
Site visitors can also now create their very own festival program by adding their favorite events. They can then share their personal festival program with friends through a link and the list of their events will be synced across all devices because they are logged in through Facebook.
Both us and Aarhus Festuge are very pleased with the end result!
