EAGLE SOLUTIONS
I built the trilingual website of the Early Music Festival of Miercurea Ciuc on WordPress: festival programme, summer university with masterclasses and fees, ticket sales and organiser-editable content. Running since 1980, the festival is one of the region's most important cultural events.
The challenge
The Early Music Festival of Miercurea Ciuc has been running since 1980 and is one of the region's most important cultural events. With a festival of that history the website has to serve more than the current year: alongside the programme and tickets, the summer university's masterclasses, the participation fees and the archive of previous years all ask for space. All of it in three languages, because the festival's audience and participants are Hungarian, Romanian and international.
The solution
- A trilingual WordPress build (HU/RO/EN) in which the programme and the courses are available in all three languages.
- A festival programme that can be swapped year to year without rebuilding the structure.
- The summer university in its own section: masterclasses, tutors, participation fees and registration. This is a standalone product with an international audience inside the festival.
- Ticket sales on the visitor side.
- An archive, so that forty-five years of history do not lose their trace under the new edition.
- Organiser-editable content.
The result
The festival and the summer university live on one site, in three languages, and the organisers manage them themselves. For an event running since 1980, continuity is a value: the site structure was built so future editions fit into it rather than requiring a rewrite.
Two audiences, one website
The Early Music Festival in Miercurea Ciuc actually has two different audiences, and each looks for something else. The festival visitor wants the programme, the venues and the ticket, usually on a phone, often on the move. The summer university participant instead looks at master classes, teachers, the participation fee and the application deadline, often from abroad, weeks or months in advance. Mixed into one menu, the two needs lose both audiences. So the summer university got its own section with its own subpages and the festival got its own. It still stays clear that these are two halves of the same event.
Three languages at an international event
Early music is an international field: some of the teachers and participants come from abroad. The Hungarian, Romanian and English versions are therefore an operating condition. Each language got its own URLs and its own search optimisation, and the language switcher goes to the counterpart of the current page: from a master class description to the corresponding English description, not to the home page.
The archive as an asset
For a festival running since 1980, earlier editions are the proof of the event's standing. The archive is therefore a structural element in its own right: the programmes and materials of past years stay put, at their own unchanged addresses. That gives two things. The visitor sees the history behind the festival, and the search engine finds real content on the same domain that grows year after year. That keeps a seasonal site alive out of season.
What the organisers run themselves
The festival programme is replaced completely every year, and that cannot depend on a developer: in the final weeks a time or a performer changes daily. The programme, the newsletter signup, the partners and the master classes are therefore editable from the admin without rebuilding the structure. Ticket sales are reachable from the visitor side so that deciding and buying do not split into two separate steps.
