Year after year one of the big concerns the Firefly team sees mentioned by their audience is that they don’t recognize a lot of the smaller acts appearing at the festival.
It’s impossible to expect fans to know every artist, so I proposed a section of the site be created to showcase all the artists from the lineup.
A visitor would be able to easily click any artist name and a popup would show a YouTube clip of their biggest hit (or a SoundCloud playlist if available) and links to their social profiles.
At first, every popup would load content by default – after all, they had to retrieve each of these social links and embeds from their respective artist’s custom post. This, as you can imagine, caused significant and untenable load delays for the page.
So, using the WordPress API and AJAX, I crafted the artist popup to only request the artist data when a user had clicked on the artist name. This immediately resolved page load speed issues and the popup did not suffer for it.
Getting to know Firefly’s lineup got that much easier.
But then I took things one step further.
It’s tedious to click through over 100 bands to find ones you’d like.
What if you were able to select an existing band you loved on the lineup and related artists would be highlighted for you?
That way, you’d be able to listen to similar bands to the one you already liked – increasing your chance to enjoy new music at Firefly and the likelihood that you’d attend.
I pitched the talent team and built out Firefly’s Discover Artists page on the website. The Firefly team could easily select which artists were related to each other in the WP backend while visitors could view those similar artists as they were instantly highlighted on the lineup.
Coupled with the artist popup and a full page of curated playlists, exploring new music at Firefly is easier than ever.