Developing a custom grassroots music festival events website
About the client
Doonfest is Scotland’s most vibrant grassroots music celebration — a two-day festival in the East Ayrshire village of Dalrymple, born from the passion of local musicians and community dreamers. It’s part of the village’s wider charitable community programme, organised by volunteers and held on land gifted to the community for the community’s benefit.
Across its stages, Doonfest pairs emerging Scottish talent with much-loved local performers — a festival where artists and audiences meet on equal ground.
The challenge
Doonfest is a two-day grassroots music festival in Dalrymple, East Ayrshire — part of the village’s charitable community programme, organised by a small team of volunteer locals and held on land gifted to the community.
A festival lives or dies on feel, and its website is the first taste anyone gets. Doonfest needed a site with as much personality as the event itself — and underneath the character, serious machinery: ticket sales, a lineup that changes as acts confirm, visitor information from accessibility to accommodation, sponsors, news and a gallery. All against a date that doesn’t move, and all manageable by volunteers rather than a web team.
Our approach
Design first. We built Doonfest a neo-retro identity of its own: a bold retro display face, a vibrant tonal colour system — hot pinks, sky blues and warm creams, each engineered as a proper palette with light and dark stops — and playful shapes and gradients that carry the festival’s energy through every page. Beautiful, subtle animation runs throughout, revealing content as you scroll without ever getting in the way of it.
Custom where it counts. The lineup is a custom event-listing system: every act, stage and set time is structured content the organisers manage themselves, with a stage-by-stage filter for festivalgoers. Ticketing is a custom WooCommerce experience, simplified and optimised — a slide-out basket, a streamlined checkout with Stripe, and sales the festival controls completely, right down to the friendly hand-off to gate sales when the online window closes. The same shop even powers the festival’s silent-auction fundraiser.
Solid underneath. It all runs on native WordPress, fully editable by the team — the same foundations as our academic platforms, wearing very different clothes. The site went live in February, tickets went on sale in March, and in July the field in Dalrymple was dancing.
What we delivered
Project details
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