Overview

Sydney Writers Festival is an annual event celebrating all things literary. It features over 400 events and brings together some of the most celebrated authors and publishers in the world. With annual audiences of over 100,000, it is one of the largest arts and cultural festivals in Australia.

SWF had recently launched a new brand hierarchy and looked to expand the festival to bigger and better venues across Sydney. To better support the growing festival, they set about redeveloping their web application suite, incorporating the expanding programme, online ticketing, sponsorship and catering to a larger and more diverse audience.

Deepend redeveloped Sydney Writers’ Festival’s digital platform on Umbraco, creating a modular, scalable experience that supported a growing program, online ticketing and large traffic spikes. The site drove more than 30% year-on-year growth in organic traffic and interaction and supported the Festival’s highest volume of ticket sales at the time.

The Challenge

Sydney Writers’ Festival was expanding its program, venues and audience while introducing a refreshed brand hierarchy. Its existing digital experience needed to support more than 400 events, annual audiences of over 100,000, online ticketing, sponsorship and a growing volume of content.

The Opportunity

A flexible, modular platform could translate the new brand into a richer digital experience while fitting the Festival’s existing planning workflow and supporting periods of intense traffic around program launches.

Our Approach

Deepend developed the platform on the open-source Umbraco CMS, combining a modular design system with integrations for event data and ticketing.

The experience was designed to adapt between peak Festival periods and the rest of the year, while technical architecture and indexing were tuned to support high concurrent traffic

What We Delivered

• Umbraco CMS implementation
• Modular and scalable experience design
• Digital brand and motion guidance
• Evolving digital style guide
• FileMaker workflow integration
• Tessitura T-New ticketing integration
• Festival and non-Festival publishing modes
• Custom Lucene search indexing
• High-traffic performance optimisation
• Accessible colour and content treatments

Impact

• More than 30% year-on-year increase in organic traffic and interaction
• Supported the highest volume of ticket sales in the Festival’s history at the time
• Reduced duplicate content-entry effort by matching the existing FileMaker workflow
• Created a flexible platform that adapts between Festival and non-Festival periods
• Improved scalability for high volumes of concurrent search and content queries

Problem & Insight

The Festival required more than a visual redesign. Its digital platform had to work with established event-planning processes, handle a large and changing program, and remain responsive during short periods of very high demand.

This made workflow compatibility, modular publishing and technical performance central to the solution.

Strategy & Experience Design

Deepend extended the Festival’s static brand into a digital system that could work across animation, video and interactive content while maintaining accessibility.

A living digital style guide created reusable design rules, while flexible modules allowed administrators to change the prominence and weighting of events within the Festival calendar.

Technology & Delivery

The platform was built on a highly modular Umbraco implementation. Festival administrators could upload event and participant information from the existing FileMaker database, reducing duplicate content entry.

Tessitura T-New was integrated for online ticket purchasing, while a custom Lucene index increased the number of concurrent content queries the platform could process during high-traffic periods.

Flexible Publishing

Because the Festival is concentrated into a short annual period, the site was designed with distinct in-Festival and out-of-Festival modes.

Event calendars and time-sensitive content could take priority during the Festival, while news and editorial content could become more prominent throughout the rest of the year.

Results

The redeveloped site delivered more than 30% year-on-year growth in organic traffic and interaction and supported the highest volume of ticket sales in the Festival’s history at the time.

The modular Umbraco architecture also gave the Festival a stronger foundation for managing content, ticketing and changing audience needs across the annual event cycle.

Frequently Asked Questions

What did Deepend build for Sydney Writers’ Festival?

Deepend redeveloped Sydney Writers’ Festival’s website on Umbraco, creating a modular platform for event publishing, festival content, online ticketing, sponsorship and year-round editorial content.

What results did the Sydney Writers’ Festival website achieve?

The live case study reports more than 30% year-on-year growth in organic traffic and interaction, alongside the highest volume of ticket sales in the Festival’s history at the time.

How did Umbraco support Sydney Writers’ Festival?

Umbraco provided the modular CMS foundation for the platform, allowing Festival administrators to manage changing content priorities, event information and reusable page components across the annual Festival cycle.

How was ticketing integrated into the Sydney Writers’ Festival website?

Deepend integrated the cloud-based Tessitura T-New ticketing platform, allowing audiences to move from event discovery into ticket purchasing through the digital experience.

How did Deepend prepare the site for large Festival traffic spikes?

Deepend developed a custom Lucene index to support a larger number of concurrent content queries than standard search, helping the site perform during major spikes in traffic around the Festival program.