Case Study
Services
The Salt Lake Book Festival is a literary festival at The Gateway in downtown Salt Lake City, built for devoted readers, the quietly curious and everyone in between. Its first year, on October 17, 2026, brought author conversations, panels, signings, a curated market and a family stage, with The Prologue kickoff at the Salt Lake City Public Library the night before.
The Salt Lake Book Festival had no website to build on. It was a first-year event, so the site had to introduce the festival to the city before there were past years, photos or reviews to point to, and it had to be live months before opening day.
It also had a lot of people to serve at once. Readers needed the line-up, the schedule and tickets. Booksellers and makers needed to apply for the market, volunteers needed to sign up, and sponsors and donors needed a reason to back a festival that hadn't happened yet. With authors and events announced on a rolling basis, the festival team had to be able to add them as they were confirmed.
We built the design around the festival's own bright identity: cream pages, deep cobalt sections, red labels and yellow buttons, with the colorful stacked-book shapes from its branding carried through the homepage and page footers. DM Sans headlines and Source Sans 3 text keep it friendly and easy to read, which matters for a festival that wants first-time readers to feel welcome.
Underneath, we developed the site on WordPress and Elementor Pro, with authors managed as their own content type. Each author published gets a profile page and appears in the homepage carousel, the line-up page and the Attending Authors grid on the schedule. Event tickets link straight to each session's ticket page, and a WooCommerce store sells festival merch alongside one-time and monthly donations.
The site carries readers from a first look at the line-up to a seat at their favorite session. Choose a feature to see it on the site.
The homepage opens onto the 2026 line-up in a sliding carousel of arched author portraits on deep cobalt. Each portrait links to that author's page, and the full line-up page lists all 25 authors in one grid.
The site gave a brand-new event a confident, colorful presence from day one. Readers, authors and sponsors found a festival with a clear voice and a full program, not a placeholder page.
Readers go to the line-up and schedule, booksellers and makers to the vendor page, helpers to volunteering, and sponsors to partnerships. Each page ends with the same invitation to get tickets or see the schedule.
Each new author is added once from the WordPress dashboard and shows up in the homepage carousel, the line-up and the schedule's author grid on their own. The festival team could announce names as they were confirmed without designing new pages.
With the first festival behind it, the homepage now points readers to fall 2027. The same structure carries into next year, with the newsletter, shop and donations working year-round in between.
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