Unifying Five Festival Sites Into One Scalable Platform
The Word On The Street is Canada's largest book and magazine festival, hosted annually in five cities. Its mission extends beyond celebration — supporting literacy awareness and strengthening the Canadian publishing ecosystem. Despite its national cultural prominence, its digital presence was fragmented: separate festival sites with inconsistent patterns, an outdated main site, limited mobile responsiveness, and a brand identity that lacked cohesion. Content management was especially painful — authors, books, schedules, and venues changed annually across all five cities, and updating each site independently was a significant operational burden for a nonprofit organization with limited resources.
The Problem
Five festivals operating as separate digital properties, each with different UX patterns, different content workflows, and different levels of maintenance. Complex annual updates were labor-intensive and error-prone. Mobile responsiveness was limited at a time when festival-goers increasingly checked schedules and author info on their phones while at events. The platform needed to support multiple stakeholder groups — attendees browsing schedules, authors promoting appearances, and sponsors expecting visibility — while keeping content manageable year over year with a small team.
The Approach
I conducted a full experience audit across all six properties (the main organizational site plus five festival sites) and reframed the strategy around a unified, content-first platform that could scale across festivals and years without requiring a rebuild each cycle.
I refreshed the visual identity to give the organization a cohesive national presence, then designed an imagery-driven interface that highlighted authors, books, and events — putting the content that drew people to the festival front and center rather than burying it behind organizational navigation. I built an interactive, searchable festival schedule with venue, time, and genre filtering so attendees could find what they were looking for quickly, whether planning ahead or browsing on-site.
On the infrastructure side, I created a custom WordPress template that streamlined content entry, linking, and annual updates. The framework was designed for maintainability: when the next festival cycle came around, the team could update content without re-architecting the site. Donation flows and social media touchpoints were integrated to support community engagement and fundraising — connecting the digital experience to the organization's broader mission of literacy advocacy.
Impact
Unified five festival sites under one cohesive digital ecosystem — eliminating redundant maintenance across properties
Simplified annual content management workflows, reducing update effort for a resource-constrained nonprofit team
Elevated the festival's national brand presence with a refreshed visual identity and content-first design
Delivered a scalable, responsive platform designed to support future growth across new cities and programming formats