Frome Festival
A complete WordPress rebuild — events calendar, ticketing and eCommerce, run entirely by the festival team
Frome Festival had outgrown its old website. With a two-week annual programme, dozens of events submitted by outside performers and venues, and merchandise and memberships to sell, the team needed a platform that could do far more — without becoming dependent on a developer to run it.
The brief
Build a website that could handle everything a modern arts festival needs — event listings, public submissions, ticket and merchandise sales, Gift Aid, mailing list growth — while staying something the festival's own (largely volunteer) team could manage themselves, year after year, without bespoke code standing in the way.
What we built
An events calendar performers and venues can submit to directly. Using The Events Calendar, the festival team publish their own programme and accept public submissions from external performers — no manual data entry required for every listing.
A full online shop. WooCommerce handles ticketing, merchandise, and virtual and downloadable products (festival programmes, digital passes), so the whole retail side of the festival runs through the same site as the programme.
Gift Aid, built in. As a charity-run event, Frome Festival can now collect Gift Aid declarations directly at checkout — extending the value of every ticket and donation without extra admin.
Recurring income via Stripe. A Stripe subscription integration supports ongoing membership or "Friends of the Festival"-style giving, giving the festival a source of income that isn't limited to the two weeks of the event itself.
Data the team can actually use. Both event and eCommerce data export cleanly, so the festival can report on ticket sales, submissions and income without asking us to pull it for them.
Advertising and mailing list growth, via Advanced Ads and Mailchimp — supporting the festival's own revenue and audience-building between events.
Training, not lock-in
As with every Webzang build, the handover included recorded training sessions so the festival team can make their own updates going forward — add events, edit pages, update the shop — without needing to come back to us for routine changes. That's the same principle behind all our sites: full admin access, no dependency.
The result
The festival team now runs a renewable green energy website that is helps self-service events and eCommerce platform for a two-week event with a long list of moving parts — entirely in-house, on a stack of well-supported, out-of-the-box plugins rather than custom code that only we could maintain.
