Portfolio > SALA Festival

Paradiso Group Website Case Study

The South Australian Living Artists (SALA) Festival is Australia’s largest visual arts festival. Established in 1998, the festival is held every August in venues all over South Australia.

Create a new website for SALA with an easy to use CMS
Create a separate Festival website and Mobile website
Build an Artist Registration form
Allow artists to build their own online Portfolio
Migrate all required information across from the existing SALA website
Provide unique facilities within the content management system to suit SALA’s needs.

Strategic Plan: SALA approached DBG to redevelop their websites with a view that these 2 websites would be managed from the one content management system, and that their implementation would assist in taking the Festival to the next level by streamlining processes and extending reach.

Regular SALA site: The regular SALA website (www.salainc.com.au) is the online home for the festival and is online year-round. The design of this site was based around simplicity and ease of use. The website is not only for showcasing sponsors, posting news articles or building awareness for the event – it also exists to allow artists to create online portfolios and concurrently acting as the primary registration mechanism for the festival. Much time was taken to ensure that the creation of the complex registration form was easy to use and thoroughly tested.

SALA Festival Site: The Festival site is only online for 3 months of the year, and is specifically aimed at operating as an online festival program, where people can search the festival and all exhibits by artist name, artist’s experience, medium, category, and much more. The design of this site was very different to the Regular SALA site as it is themed around the festival poster artwork. Within this site the layout of the individual Exhibition pages were of critical importance as there was a plethora of information that needed to be laid out in a clear and concise fashion.

SALA Mobile Website: Early in the planning stages of the entire project it was identified that a mobile website would be beneficial to allow the Festival Site to be better accessed by users ‘on the go’. Like the Festival site, this was designed around the 2011 poster, but was also focussed on being easy to navigate in a mobile browser (typically smaller screen resolutions). Planning was undertaken to scope out what information mobile users would want to access, and how to display this information in the best manner.

The 2 SALA websites act as the cornerstone for this fantastic South Australian festival. Online registrations in 2011 were up and the festival is bigger than ever this year with 4,132 artists being showcased over 543 venues across the state.

“SALA could not have selected a more perfect partner as DBG for our web development. Through a spirit of collaboration, clear vision, concise communication and calm, DBG delivered all that was asked of them; against the odds of both tight time frames and restricted budget.

Together, what we have created is a website that has the functionality for our business needs now and for years to follow.

The professional and personal investment DBG has made to ensuring SALA maintained continuity of service whilst delivering a bold new website has increased our reputation and brand awareness across multiple and diverse markets both locally and nationally.
Congratulations to the entire team of DBG.”

Penny McAuley, General Manager – SALA Inc.