The Client:

The South Mountain Fair takes place the third weekend in August every year in the small town of South Mountain. It is hosted by the Mountain Township Agricultural Society, and has a long, rich history of over 130 years. It draws over 10,000 people every year, and features everything from a midway and games to agricultural, floriculture, home craft, and culinary exhibits to beef, dairy, poultry and horse shows. The fair also brings a lineup of entertainment, including live musicians, a demolition derby, tractor and truck pulls, and a rodeo.

The Problem:

The fair’s website was several years old, and needed a refreshed design. It also had a lot of dropdown menus, making the navigation bloated. On the back end of the site, adding the information for the exhibits and events was inconsistent, as some required copying and pasting the text onto the page, while others involved adding a photo of a poster, which doesn’t help that page get found on Google, as text in photos can’t be read by search engines.

The Solution:

The first step was to come up with a new navigation structure. We decided to omit all the individual pages for the events and exhibits from the main menu, instead putting them as internal links on the home page, and overview pages for events and exhibits. This allowed us to simply the menu and make it easier for visitors to find the information they are looking for.

From there, we worked with the nostalgia associated with the fair’s tagline ‘A Fair to Remember’, and came up with the idea for a film strip design on the home page featuring images from the fair.

We made sure the site was fully optimized for mobile, as most people visit the site on their phones before and during fair time.

We also created a template for the events and exhibits page to create a consistent look across them, and to simplify the process of adding information to them.

The Result:

The MTAS is very pleased with the new site, especially with the simplicity of the navigation and the prominent placement of the hall rental, which is very important for them.