Blue Star Business Services

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Website Project: Northwest Arkansas Pride 2022

Northwest Arkansas Pride 2022 homepage

Blue Star Business Services is proud to have designed, developed, and managed the Northwest Arkansas Pride 2022 event website. We have worked with Northwest Arkansas Equality on website services for Pride every year since 2018.

As the event has grown each year, our work on the site has grown along with it. Northwest Arkansas Pride is now the state's largest event of its kind, and it's the largest annual event on Dickson Street in Fayetteville. An estimated 35,000 people attended Northwest Arkansas Pride 2022. More than 9,000 users visited NWAPride.org during Pride Month, June 2022.

Since 2018, we have provided affordable mobile-friendly web design and development to this great community nonprofit organization. Coming out of the pandemic, website visitors in 2022 were greeted with a redesigned mobile-first experience and several upgrades from previous years.

New Features for 2022

Real-Time "Events Happening Now"

For the first time, visitors to the Pride homepage during the event were served a real-time "Events Happening Now" section. Happening Now events also included a real-time dynamic Progress Bar, showing how much time was left of the event.

Pride 2022 "Events Happening Now" feature. Note: The dates and times are from a test version of this new features. The real website featured the correct dates and times.

New and Improved Events Navigation

For 2022, we created a color-coded main events page, listing everything happening at the festival in chronological order. Each location or stage also got its own page, which listed just the events for that location. We created a series of dynamic widgets, so that event information only had to be entered once, to appear on multiple pages throughout the site as needed.

We also reconfigured the events calendar so that events no longer expired off the site once they passed. This way, visitors could still see the information about performers and events even after they were over.

Color-coded all events page
Location page
Events Menu

Event SEO Boost

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is one of the biggest considerations with a live event. You want visitors to be able to easily find your website and the information on it in search results, well before the event date.
Each event was given its own calendar entry with metadata. The purpose of this was to give each event a boost in SEO. We also requested Google to re-index the site before the event, so that all the Pride events would appear in Google's "Events" snippet on search results pages.
Single event entry with SEO-optimized metadata

Expanded Mobile-First Experience

While all of our web development projects are mobile-friendly, we also took the extra step to ensure a mobile-first experience. The vast majority of visitors to the NWA Pride website on the day of the event viewed the site on their mobile phones. We designed the homepage to ensure visitors could reach all major sections of the site using friendly buttons and image links, without having to go to the dropdown "hamburger" navigation menu.

Northwest Arkansas Pride 2022 mobile homepage hamburger menu
Northwest Arkansas Pride 2022 mobile homepage events
Northwest Arkansas Pride 2022 mobile homepage info

Additional Info Pages

We also worked with NWA Pride 2022 organizers to add new types of information as the event has grown. This included street closure information, parking and transit routes, and security. In some cases, we monitored social media before the event and made suggestions for adding additional info pages, based on the types of questions potential visitors were asking.

Road Closures and Info Pages

Note: Redesigned Northwest Arkansas Pride logo was created by Jacobs & Co.

We Are Here to Help

Supporting great community events and nonprofits is what we're all about. If your large event, street fair, film festival, or annual parade needs affordable website design, development and website management, contact us at 479-879-2068 or info@bluestarbiz.com.