Swanage Shanty Festival
A one-day sea shanty festival in Swanage, Dorset — twelve crews, two stages, one November Saturday at The Mowlem on the seafront.
The brief
The Swanage Shanty Festival is a one-day festival of working songs by the sea: twelve crews across two stages at The Mowlem, with the day moving between them so there's always someone singing and never a clash. It's a community event, which means the honest version of the brief was "everything is still being confirmed, and nobody wants to spend their evenings learning website-admin software."
So the site had to be comfortable being ahead of the festival. Set times provisional, some bios still to come, tickets not yet on sale — the site launches anyway, looks finished, and each real detail drops in as a one-line change rather than a rebuild.
The build
- 01A whole site driven by two simple filesOne holds the lineup, one holds everything else — copy, times, contacts, what Google reads. Nothing to subscribe to, nothing to break, no monthly bill.
- 02A lineup that can't contradict itselfEvery band list orders itself by stage and set time, and every count — "Twelve Crews" — is counted from the same list. Move a band, and the whole site follows.
- 03Ticket buttons on a switchEvery buy-tickets button stays hidden until the box office is ready, then one change turns them all on at once.
- 04The brand, not just the siteLogo, palette, type and the full website design, all from scratch — warm and a little salty, without a single pirate cliché.
- 05Fast and accessible on any devicePages that load in a blink, a design that works from phone to desktop, and every colour combination tested against the official accessibility standard — readable for everyone, on anything.
The details
Festival sites drift: the poster says twelve bands, the lineup page lists eleven, the schedule still shows last month's times. Here that can't happen — running orders, stage bills and every written count come from one master list of bands, so a late lineup change is a single edit and nothing on the site can disagree with anything else. The event listing that search engines read is generated from the same place, so Google gets the same facts as the page.
The festival needed an identity before it needed a website, because it didn't have one. The logo, the sunset-and-sea palette and the type were all designed from scratch, with the rules written down so the brand survives contact with posters and social graphics later. And because readable contrast was designed into the palette from day one — every colour pairing tested to the official accessibility standard — the accessible version of the site isn't a compromise on the design, it is the design.
A new festival's site has to go up before the festival is fully real. Everything not yet confirmed is an explicit, tracked placeholder — provisional times are labelled as provisional, missing band photos get a designed fallback instead of a broken image, and until launch day the site stays out of Google and the ticket buttons stay hidden, so nobody ever clicks something that doesn't work.
Community event, community-sized running costs. Every page is built ahead of time and served ready-made, so there's nothing slow to wait for — quick even on one bar of seafront phone signal — and the design works as well on a phone as on a laptop. Fast, accessible, and hosting it costs pennies.
Questions you might have
The stuff small-business buyers actually email me about. Answered up front so you don't have to.
01Do I own the site?
Yes, completely. The code is yours, the design is yours, the domain is yours. If you ever want to take it elsewhere, just ask — I'll hand over everything you need to move it. No lock-in, no hostage situation.
02Can I edit it myself once it's built?
Depends what "edit" means, and on whether we build you an admin area — some sites need one, plenty genuinely don't. If we do: swap a photo, change a price, add a news post, all yours, and I'll show you how. Redesign the whole homepage — that's more of a job than an edit, so that one usually comes back to me.
03What if you get hit by a bus?
Fair question, asked surprisingly often. Your site lives on hosting in your name, the code is yours, and there's a handover document with everything any other developer would need to pick it up. The whole thing is built with popular, well-supported frameworks rather than anything I've invented myself, so you're not stuck with a one-of-a-kind setup only I understand. Bus or no bus, you keep the site.
04I'm not technical at all. Is that a problem?
Not even slightly. Most of my clients aren't technical. I'll never make you "log into the cPanel" or send you a JSON file. If something needs to happen, I'll either do it for you or write you a one-page guide with screenshots.
05How does payment work?
Usually 50% up front and 50% on launch, by UK bank transfer, with 14 days on the invoice. That's just the default though — if spreading it out differently suits you better, say so and we'll sort something that works. If you want me looking after the site once it's live, that's a separate monthly thing — direct debit or standing order, cancel anytime.
06Is the price plus VAT?
No. pixel61 ltd isn't VAT-registered, so what you see is what you pay. (If that ever changes, the pricing here will be updated and the FAQ will say so.)
07Will my site show up on Google?
Yes. I do the proper basics on every site — page titles, descriptions, a sitemap, fast load times, and the behind-the-scenes info that tells Google exactly what your business is. That gets you found when someone searches for your business name or "[your-thing] in [your-town]", which is what most small-business customers are actually doing. What I don't do is promise you'll rank #1 for "web designer" or "best plumber" against people who've spent years and tens of thousands on SEO. Anyone who promises that is selling you something else.
08Can you fix / redesign my existing site instead of starting fresh?
Honestly? Usually no. Most of the time it's quicker, cheaper and better for both of us to start fresh on a small site than wrestle with someone else's old code. If you really want me to look at an existing site, I will — but I'll tell you straight if a rebuild is the better call.
Want to chat about a site?
Festival, band, café, distillery, holiday let, anything. Fill in the boxes and hit send — none of it is required, the more you tell me the more useful my reply will be. Comes straight to my inbox, no team, no triage.
Prefer a quick chat first? Book a 30-minute call
Or skip the form and email me directly: hello@pixel61.com
If it helps, here's what to include
None of it is required, but the more you tell me up front, the more useful my reply will be:
- 01Roughly what you're building.A holiday let? A café? A festival? Something else?
- 02Any sites you like the look of?(yours or anyone else's) — saves a thousand words.
- 03What's driving the timingLaunching something? Old site embarrassing you? Festival in October?
- 04A rough budgetIf you've got one. A ballpark or "no idea yet" are both genuinely fine — it just helps me point you at something sensible.
I'll come back with either "yes, let's do it, here's how" or "no, here's why, here's who I'd point you at instead". Both are useful — neither will take a week to land in your inbox.