Serious + London Jazz Festival
Serious create and produce jazz, world & contemporary music concerts, shows and tours, working with artists and musicians from the UK and internationally. One of their jewel’s in their crown is The EFG London Jazz Festival — an annual celebration of Jazz music and is produced by Serious.
We have worked closely with Serious for a number of years helping them develop and strengthen their online presence – designing, building and maintaining various website including EFG London Jazz Festival.
Serious
In 2016, I launched a new website for Serious as part of a larger project which involved migrating a number of their websites from ExpressionEngine to Craft CMS as well as relocating their websites to a new faster web server. This version of the website focused on simplifying the website’s structure, making it easier for the user to locate content quickly (a failing of their old website), however, that wasn’t the only improvement we made.
We also designed the website to be responsive so it works on all devices, made better use of images to create a visually rich experience, improved the performance of the website for better SEO, and made the client’s life easier by building the website so it is a doddle to maintain.
To support Serious’ Trust activities, we developed an online donations portal in 2019 that allowed users to donate via an integrated Stripe payment solution – making it easier for users to donate and, of course, increase the number of donations.
The solution was a little more complex than a just adding a single form. The user can choose from pre-defined donation amounts or simply donate anything they like.
2020 is the year we would like to forget, but none more so than businesses that involved people gathering in close proximity. With no prospect for live performances, the Serious team were in a quandary. Like many, the solution was to live stream events so we were asked to develop a new website for Serious and EFG London Jazz Festival in record time to ensure there was a festival.
EFG London Jazz Festival
Imagine running an international jazz festival and COVID hits. No flights, no acts, no people, no festival. But that wasn’t going to stop the amazing Serious team. They decided that if the world could not come to London then the the festival would go to them.
Not only did we embark on a redesign of the website, but we were also (for the first time ever) going to stream the festival live on the website.
Without knowing how many visitors the website may get we needed to ensure the hosting could cope with any spike in traffic and also be on-hand to sort any problems should occur. Thankfully, the website performed beautifully and was so successful the festival continues to be offered as a hybrid event with both in-person and stream events — reaching a larger audience than ever before.
As our partnership continues with the Serious team, we hope to make a concerted effort to improve the overall accessibility of both websites.
EFG London Jazz Festival website
For full disclosure, this project was inherited from Scaramanga Agency.
