The Small Business Festival is a celebration of small businesses in Victoria.

The festival brings together a range of business events under one umbrella, and showcases workshops, talks, roadshows, webinars, podcasts and other activities hosted by various individuals and groups.

The client had already established a brand and comic book identity for the Small Business Festival, and needed help bringing this concept to life in a digital environment.

Being a government website, it was paramount to adhere to strict standards and support a range of web browsers without compromising the experience.

It was also critical for the website to use event data from the client’s existing Salesforce CRM, ensuring that data was suitably adapted for use in the website while being easy to administer.

Assemblo was required to refine the client’s existing database architecture to ensure that the data was indexed, making it easy for users to filter, sort and search the events.

The client requested integration with their Campaign Monitor mailing list, via an easy email sign-up on the site, as well as a feature that showcased the brand’s Instagram feed. The site also required SSL certification.

The site needed to include detailed tracking and analytics for reporting purposes to help measure the success of the website for the duration of the festival.

Overall, the client needed a website that was visually engaging, functional and compliant, and delivered within a very tight time frame.

Working closely with the client, Assemblo designed and developed a striking, mobile-first responsive website for the Small Business Festival.

The website showcases more than 600 events across Victoria (metropolitan and regional) and every event has a page featuring the event details, a description, an interactive Google map, and a booking link. The site also allows for additional information and detail to be added to feature events.

The site is built on a heavily customised WordPress CMS and includes a powerful search feature that allows users to easily find and filter events by topic, date and location. The site includes a blog to share useful information from the government and their event partners.

To enhance the comic book theme across the site, we incorporated a bold and brightly coloured design, as well as interactive animations, halftone effects and striking gradients of colour. A stylised navigation menu helps to further enhance the superhero theme.

The site features several fun interactive elements such as animated roll-over effects, and a bold and tactile user interface that rewards interaction.

One example of rewarded interaction is an animated superhero character that features prominently on the ‘back to top’ button when users scroll down the site. Clicking on this button quickly takes users to the top of the page and rewards them with an exciting animated effect of the character flying to the top of the page.

Agile methodology was crucial to ensuring the project could be delivered to an extremely tight time frame, along with constant communication with the client throughout the project development.

Overall, the site offers users a fun and engaging online experience while delivering detailed information on key business events across Victoria.