A website for a brand that changes every two years
Every two years for the festival LIFT (London International Festival of Theatre) gets a new look. This fresh injection of energy into the look and feel for the festival generates excitement around the new programme. But it also contributed to a lack of brand recognisability. When I joined LIFT their website was complex to use and most updates had to be delivered by a developer, which had a cost attached. This meant the website didn’t change off-festival. It stayed dormant until the following biennial.
One of my first projects on joining LIFT was to commission a new site. I oversaw the project from end-to-end, from writing the brief, running a procurement process, selecting the brilliant Cog design and delivering a new site on time for the launch of our 2022 festival. This was a collaborative project connecting Cog with our designer Studio Doug and facilitating feedback and sign-off processes with LIFT’s executive team. The site was designed to solve the challenges I identified: the lack of core brand recognisability, the need for constant developer support to make even small changes, the changing priorities of the organisation on- and off-festival.
The genius of the resulting website is the functionality Cog created to switch between two modes: on and off-festival. This allows LIFT to maintain a core off-festival brand year round, and then switch to festival mode and update the look and feel every two years. On-festival the homepage is an events programme, and off-festival it’s a magazine-style blog page sharing all updates from the world of LIFT. We also streamlined the user experience, creating many more internally linking pages to support information discovery and SEO. The average session duration has doubled with the new site.
Key skills:
Strategic thinking
Content and communications strategy
Project management
Brief writing
Procurement