Moving from Wicklow, Ireland, to the UK was undoubtedly the best decision for my life. But I do miss home and wonder how to feel more connected even when I can’t be there physically.
When my friend joined our county’s Pride committee as their website overseer, I jumped at the chance to do something positive for the place where I grew up and make Wicklow Pride a website that would accommodate the expansion of the parade to a week-long festival.
Grand designs
I started by looking at the existing website to identify possible UX improvements. It was a decent and functional site, but I quickly realised there were limits to what I could do with their current build.
I decided to rebuild the site from the ground up. Once I had a clear plan, I dove into Figma to design the homepage. Collaborating with my friend Adam, we aimed to create a look and feel that captured the festive and welcoming vibe of Wicklow Pride.
I started with mobile designs, knowing that most visitors would be browsing the site on their phones, and then adapted the design for desktop.
After finalising the homepage, it became a team effort between Adam and me, with continuous input from the rest of the committee, to develop the rest of the page templates and ensure the site was both consistent and user-friendly, as well as in line with their specific asks and vision.
Parts ‘n’ crafts
Having used Craft CMS on multiple projects at Studio 24 and preferring it as my go-to CMS, I decided to rebuild the website using Craft. While the site was working on WiX, Craft offered out-of-the-box custom solutions that fit a lot better with the impact Wicklow Pride was aiming to have on the community.
With the designs Adam and I had worked on, I was able to swiftly develop a prototype and present an initial draft of the site by November 2023 (after being brought on board in October of the same year). To ensure it was testable by Adam and the wider Wicklow Pride committee, I hosted it on a subdomain of my website.
BetWiXt two servers
The original Wicklow Pride website was built and maintained on WiX, which meant it wasn’t as simple as switching the DNS from their servers to mine. WiX locks their domains to their nameservers, so I had to adapt my usual migration strategies to accommodate this.
Once the transition was complete, I could help the Wicklow Pride committee get the most out of their domain, such as creating dedicated company emails for department-specific communications, all without incurring additional costs.
Eventually, we did end up transferring the domain away from WiX and it is now entirely hosted on my servers.
Gettin’ busy
Getting the website fully migrated couldn’t have happened at a better time, as we were given a bit of a trial by fire when Adam and Paddy (the Chair of Wicklow Pride) went on East Coast FM, our local radio show, to chat about the event and the website launch. It resulted in a surge of page visits, which gave us a good idea of what the site traffic might look like in the run-up to the festival.
With the publicity boost as a tailwind, the time had come to implement the event sign-up system on the website. Starting with a couple of smaller events in the run-up to the festival, I built sign-up forms where users could register their details with Wicklow Pride before being brought through to Eventbrite to purchase their tickets.
Let’s get this party started!
Before we knew it, Pride month was here! Summer was in full bloom and the nerves and excitement were building. With the beginning of the festival came the necessity for further functionality to be implemented on the website.
The most notable new feature was an interactive map on the homepage. This allowed visitors to click on events they were interested in and easily see what the event was, where it was taking place, and at what time.
Panic! At the disco
One of the first events for the Wicklow Pride Festival was a Rainbow Disco. This event was planned for the younger members of the community as a safe space where they could enjoy themselves without fear of judgment.
Unfortunately, due to a vocal minority of dissenters and an anti-immigration group in the host town, the committee made the difficult decision to postpone the disco until further notice for the safety of attendees.
While this was something that should not happen in this day and age, it did have something of a silver lining.
The oncoming storm
The coverage of this event meant that a lot of people were interested in endorsing Wicklow Pride and helping it in any way they could. This included the likes of the BBC, RTÉ (the Irish equivalent), The Taoiseach himself (the Irish prime minister, and himself a Wicklow boy) and none other than Kate Nash (artist of ‘Foundations’ which held the number 2 spot for almost 5 weeks in a row in 2007) all reaching out to show their support!
This storm of coverage became an unforeseen stress test for the website as it caused a massive uptick in traffic. The fact that we only noticed this surge after it happened turned out to be a reassuring endorsement of the robust foundations we had laid for the festival ahead.
Showtime!
On the 6th of July 2024, the second annual Wicklow Pride parade began! A route was marched through the town, inviting everyone from the community to show their colours and fly their flags proudly. The festivities lasted long into the evening.
Seeing all the work the six-person committee put into making it happen, as well as watching how it blossomed in the months since, made me proud to be amid the colourful flowerbed in the Garden of Ireland.
If you would like to sponsor Wicklow Pride, visit their website for more information.
