Arts by the Sea

Making art and culture click

Arts by the Sea is a vibrant annual festival that celebrates art, culture, and community along the Bournemouth coast. From large-scale visual spectacles to street theatre, music, dance, and immersive installations, the event brings creativity into public spaces while championing inclusivity, diversity, and sustainability.

While working at Plaster, I led the redevelopment of their website, which had become outdated and no longer reflected the creative, community-driven nature of the festival. The rebuild was completed in WordPress, maintaining continuity with their existing CMS while significantly modernising the user experience and visual identity.

Each year, the festival adopts a new theme, often expressed through custom visuals created by a resident artist. A key part of the build was designing the site in a way that allowed these creative assets to be easily updated year after year, giving the site a fresh, relevant look with minimal effort from the internal team.

One of the core technical challenges was building a flexible and intuitive schedule system. With dozens of performances across multiple days, times, and locations, the goal was to make it simple for the organisers to input performances and activities while also making it easy for audiences to explore what’s on. The result was a highly usable schedule feature that met both needs elegantly.

Accessibility was also a central priority. Given the inclusive ethos of the festival, I ensured the site met accessibility standards, making it usable for a wide and diverse audience.

The finished site is a bright, functional, and adaptable platform that brings the festival’s energy online and empowers the Arts by the Sea team to keep evolving year after year.