SummerWorks is Toronto’s premiere performing arts festival, programming theatre, opera, music, and multidisciplinary work each August. NOW Magazine’s dedicated microsite gave audiences a complete guide to performances, showtimes, and venues across the festival run.
ColdFusion Show Times Section
The Show Times section drove the microsite experience - a responsive, searchable event listing pulling live performance data from a ColdFusion web service. T-SQL queries against the data layer kept showtimes current throughout the festival. The same ColdFusion web service architecture used for the Fringe 2013 microsite, applied to a different festival format.
Twitter Bootstrap Responsive Front End
Bootstrap provided the responsive front-end framework, ensuring the layout worked on mobile devices for audiences looking up show times on-site at the festival. A performing arts festival audience navigates between venues on foot - a responsive layout that works on a phone is a functional requirement, not a design preference.
Repeatable Pattern for Annual Coverage
Delivering the Fringe microsite in July and the SummerWorks microsite in August of the same season established a repeatable pattern for NOW Magazine’s annual festival coverage: the same ColdFusion web service architecture, the same Bootstrap responsive approach, and the same development tooling - making the second microsite faster to deliver than the first.
