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Our Work
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The project
A city-wide jazz festival needs more than a date and a ticket button. Spotty Media designed and built Durham Jazz Festival’s website, giving its programme, artists and venues a shared online home. Built in one month and launched in March 2026, the site has continued to evolve through the launch campaign and festival programme.
Durham Jazz Festival brings live music to venues across Durham City from 23 to 25 October 2026. Its programme ranges from headline performances to intimate gigs, workshops and free events. Visitors need to compare artists, dates and locations before deciding what to book.
The website had to bring those choices together without treating every event in the same way. Some performances use TicketSource, others sell through the venue, and some need no booking. The challenge was to give the festival a distinctive presence while making that practical information easy to follow.
The festival gave Spotty Media creative freedom over the website’s design and layout. We developed a dark, music-led visual style, with warm gold accents, bold headings and artist photography. The first design was enthusiastically received by the festival team.
We carried that direction through the homepage, programme, artist and venue pages, creating a consistent experience rather than a collection of disconnected event listings. The build took one month, with the website going live in March 2026 ahead of the October festival.
Spotty Media built the site using WordPress and Elementor, with Advanced Custom Fields and custom post types supporting its content structure. This gave us the flexibility to create the festival’s visual layout while handling its programme as structured content.
That structure matters when the line-up is still changing. The website needs to accommodate artist information, venue details and event updates throughout the campaign, not simply look finished on launch day. The resulting platform supports the ongoing maintenance we now provide for the festival.
The What’s On page puts performance dates, artist summaries, venues, times and ticket information together. Visitors can scan the programme, open an artist page for more detail or follow the relevant booking route. A downloadable timetable provides another way to plan the weekend.
Artist pages give each act room for a biography and photography, alongside performance information. Venue pages help visitors understand where a show is taking place. These connected routes let someone explore the wider festival or go straight to the performance they already have in mind.
A multi-venue festival does not always have a single checkout. The Durham Jazz Festival website directs visitors to the ticket provider for each performance, including TicketSource and venue-operated booking pages. Free events can be shown without a booking requirement.
Availability is part of the information, too. As shows sell out, we update their status so visitors can see which performances remain bookable. The website brings those different arrangements together under the festival’s own identity, without suggesting that every ticket is sold on the festival site itself.
Our work continued after launch, with website maintenance and programme updates as the line-up developed.
For an event website, those smaller updates are part of the delivery. Visitors need information they can act on now, rather than a snapshot of the programme as it stood when the site launched.
The site also gives the festival space for news, workshops, sponsor information and links to its social channels. These sit alongside the programme rather than competing with the route to a performance.
As announcements bring new visitors to the website, they arrive at a recognisable festival destination with several ways to explore. The homepage introduces the event, while the programme and artist pages carry the detail needed for the next decision.
The figures shown here give a view of recorded website and tracked ticketing activity, not total festival sales. Analytics was introduced around three months before this October 2026 review, after the website’s March launch. Some venues sell their own tickets, and those sales are not fully included.
The website supported a wider campaign spanning PR, social media and venue-led ticket sales. These figures cover recorded campaign activity, rather than isolating the website build’s contribution.
Explore the Durham Jazz Festival website to see the design and programme in use. The screenshots on this page show the actual site in October 2026, including its homepage, artist information and changing ticket availability.
Planning a website for a venue or event? Find out about Spotty Media’s hospitality website design and development, or talk to us about your project. We can discuss both the launch and the information you will need to maintain afterwards.
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