Kia Mau Festival Website Design
The Kia Mau Festival is a biennial, contemporary Māori, Pasifika and international Indigenous live performance experience.
Founded in 2015 and helmed by multi-awarded winning senior artist, Hone Kouka MNZM, celebrated senior arts leader Dolina Wehipeihana and theatre and filmmaker Mīria George
Due to its rapid growth and expansion it is now presented biennially.
The Brief
After Kia Mau Festival’s first year as a biennial event, there was continued rapid growth and much interest—leading to the need for an accessible website.
The Strategy
The artists and their work is central to the Kia Mau kaupapa and the website strategy. The primary purpose is to display the events, and educate about the festival.
Each event has its own dedicated page which features detailed information about the show, dates, venue, ticketing, the history of the artists and associated collective they may be a part of. Although the website is not yet a ticketing gateway, and is hosted by the venues, the Kia Mau Festival website is the central hub of all events related to the festival.
Accessibility is important to Kia Mau, so each page has an option for the viewer to optimise the page to their liking though the Accessibly selector. This allows the visitor to customise functionality such as pausing animations, resizing the font for readability and a dyslexia-friendly view.
Elements like headings and subheadings and structure of the website for contents were designed with accessibility features.
The original wireframe featured a page dedicated to each artists, however this was updated for the details to feature on the event page.
The website component design also integrated the texture from the Kia Mau Festival visual identity, bringing brand consistency to the site.
Optimisation was also important for our client. So we focussed on the improvement of web speed for mobile, as we noticed most of their visitors were using a mobile device to access the website. This also extended to the website being responsive and fitting all screen resolutions.
As the festival continues to grow, and due to the ever changing nature of live events, the client wanted to be able to edit the website themselves. The elements and layouts were saved as templates for the client to easily update or create a post for new events.
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