Come for the food. Stay for the community.
A digital home for the city's flagship culinary festival - 60 restaurants, 40,000 attendees, one night downtown.
Taste of Alpharetta has been running for nearly three decades and pulls the entire city together for one evening every May. The site is the festival's command center: it sells tickets, drives the TasteBucks digital currency, surfaces the lineup of 60+ restaurants, and gets people to the right entrance, parking lot, and stage on the night of the event.
What was included
I designed and developed the digital command center for the city's largest culinary festival, featuring a custom CMS for vendor management, a digital TasteBucks system, and a mobile-first day-of attendee experience.
Strategy & Copy
- Event Digital Strategy
- User Journey Mapping
- Content Architecture
Website & Systems
- Custom Event Website
- Custom CMS Development
- Digital TasteBucks Integration
- Mobile Day-of Experience
• Discovery
One site, three audiences, one busy night
The festival serves three groups at once - attendees deciding what to eat, restaurants needing exposure for their booth, and sponsors looking for visibility. Discovery was about mapping how each one uses the site and making sure no one had to dig for what they came for.
The hardest part was the day-of experience. Attendees were already on-site, on their phones, looking for the next thing - which meant the site had to load instantly on a packed downtown wifi connection and surface schedule, map, and TasteBucks info in two taps.
• Website
Built for the planning weeks - and the night of the event
The site is structured around the festival journey: hype and ticketing in the lead-up, lineup and map content as the date approaches, and a mobile-first day-of experience with countdown, schedule, parking, and TasteBucks reload right at the top.
A digital TasteBucks system, restaurant directory, sponsor showcase, and FAQ all live in a CMS the city team can update themselves - so when the lineup changes the week of the event, no developer is needed.
