Challenge
FloydFest is a four-day music festival in Virginia’s Blue Ridge, produced by Across the Way Productions. Every year has its own name, art, and identity, and every year the website has to carry the reveal, ticket sales, lineup announcements in waves, partners, and a full season of email.
The announcement dates do not move. When the producers reveal next year’s festival, the new site has to be live that morning, while this year’s site keeps doing its job right up to the switch.
Approach
Each festival year gets its own theme, side by side in a single WordPress install. Next year’s site is built and reviewed while the current one stays live, then switched on at the moment of the announcement, with nothing to migrate.
The season’s email campaigns are built in the same project as the site, from the same brand assets, so the newsletter and the website always look like the same festival.
Delivery
For 2026, the site got a new design built around the year’s art: an animated logo with a prominent ticket button, a lineup page with artist pages and listening embeds, a lineup banner updated with each announcement wave, a partner logo wall, and a link to the festival’s fan-to-fan ticket exchange. Twelve email campaigns carried the season, from the first announcement in November 2025 to the 2027 save-the-date in September 2026.
For 2027, the Echoes edition got its own theme with the new brand kit, a layered animated hero, and a partners page rebuilt for the nineteen launch partners. The partnership deck went from 52MB to 4.9MB so sponsors can actually download it. The finished site was staged on the live server behind a coming-soon page, so it could be switched on in a single step.
Outcome
The 2027 Echoes site went live on October 29, 2026, the day the producers set for the reveal, ahead of tickets and the first lineup going on sale on November 5.
The producers have renewed for another festival year, extending a working relationship that began with print work thirteen years ago and now covers the festival’s website and its full email season.
Thank you, William. You are greatly appreciated, and we look forward to another great year with you … which is already off to a stellar start.