Emley Show is a country show set on the moorside of the village of Emley, famous for its mast that can be seen for miles across Yorkshire. The show itself has been running every year for over a hundred years, attracting thousands of people to the country fields under the mast.
Project Scope
The show committee asked us to take their existing website that had previously been built in-house and completely rebuild it, taking as much of the burden of having a website as possible off the team who actually run the show, so that they could focus on ensuring the event continued to be a huge success every year, whilst also having a high quality website that was easy for a variety of audiences to use.
As well as offering pre-booking of entry tickets for members of the public, the show also had to make it easy for exhibitors to enter into the show, including an assortment of animal classes from cattle and sheep to horses, birds, hamsters, a fun dog show and an equestrian event. And not forgetting the hundreds of exhibitors of cakes, sweets, foods, clothing, and so many others that go into making a country show the event it is!
Our challenge was to firstly to ensure that it was easy for their team to be able to update simple things themselves, but with a focus on ensuring that the process of exhibitors booking onto the show and paying required fees was a simple as possible for the audience to do.
We also helped the show move to an online payment system, taking payment at the time of booking. Rather than posting cheques or bank transfers, which vastly simplified the burden of accounting and improved cash flow.
The site offered an option for people to sign up as members, which gave them various benefits during the event, such as a VIP tent. We were pleased to be able to recommend the simple idea of adding a donations option to the membership sign-up page, which was a good way to generate additional funds as well as better gauge the audience’s value of the membership.
In addition, we built a custom back-end CRM system to make it easy for the show organisers to manage the hundreds of booking requests and payments from all kinds of show classes and exhibitor stands and categories, each having unique requirements in terms of booking form details needed, entry fees, optional items, donations and much more.
The site build also had an interesting demand in terms of hosting resources, needing to provide solid performance when being visited by increasing numbers of visitors buying tickets in the run up to the show and peaking on the show day as people look for show information, but then continue to return over the following days for event results
