Humorfeszt

I built the website of the Humorfeszt comedy festival in Cluj-Napoca on WordPress: performer profiles, a three-day multi-venue programme, a countdown and a prominent ticket button. I built it mobile-first, so the organisers can update programme changes themselves in the weeks before the festival.

The challenge

The website of the Cluj stand-up festival Humorfeszt has to perform in a very short, very intense window: the weeks before the festival. That is when the programme changes, new performers are announced, and when most of the ticket sales are decided. So the organisers need a site they can change themselves while they are in the middle of running a festival.

The solution

• Performer profiles in a standalone, extensible structure. A new name can be added without development.
• The three-day, multi-venue programme broken down by day: the visitor wants to know where and when on Saturday, not the structure of the whole festival.
• A countdown that also renders the pre-festival urgency visually.
• Ticket purchase in plain sight, reachable from every subpage. On an event site this is the only real conversion.
• A structure that can be refreshed year to year: the next edition needs a content swap, not a new site.
• A mobile-first build, because tickets are usually bought on a phone, often arriving from social media.

The result

The organisers handle programme changes themselves in the final pre-festival rush, and next year's edition starts again on the same site. A festival website is good when the organiser does not have to think about it and when the visitor buys a ticket in two clicks.

The performer is the product

At a comedy festival the visitor first looks at who is performing, and only then at the schedule grid. So each performer is an element in their own right: name, photo, a short introduction, and when and where they take the stage. That way the visitor goes from their favourite to the time slot. The same structure makes a performer easy to share on social media, the cheapest reach an event can get.

Several venues, one programme

The festival does not happen in one room. If the programme lives in a single long list, the visitor cannot work out what fits into one evening. The venues are therefore part of the programme: every event shows where it takes place, and the venues can be browsed separately too. At a multi-venue event this is what decides whether a visitor buys a ticket to one event or three.

The competition as its own thread

The festival also has a talent-scouting strand whose audience is partly different: here the festival is looking for entrants, not spectators. That thread therefore got its own section with the conditions, the deadline and how to apply. The audience programme does not dilute it, and vice versa. The most common mistake on an event site is giving two different audiences the same page.

Year after year, without a rebuild

The festival's editions are numbered, and the programme and line-up change completely every year. The structure was built so the next edition does not mean a new website: the organisers swap times and performers themselves in the final rush, and last year's material stays. A festival website is good when the organiser does not have to think about it and when the visitor buys a ticket in two clicks.