Run by Variant Events, the Virginia Wine Expo is Richmond’s premier annual food and wine event. A multi-day experience, the expo draws guests, exhibitors, and sponsors from across the region and beyond. Their website (virginiawineexpo.com) is a year-round hub for ticketing, event information, and audience engagement that operates in overdrive the few months leading up to the Expo every February/March.
Block 81 stepped in as Variant Events’ web design and development partner in 2020, taking over stewardship of a solid ExpressionEngine powered website from a prior developer and colleague we know and trust. Since then, the engagement has grown into a long-term partnership covering ongoing development, UI improvements, and support and maintenance.
Discovery & Strategy
Inheriting a site, regardless of who the previous developer was, comes with its own set of challenges. The first order of business was a thorough audit which included understanding the existing codebase, the CMS structure, how Variant Events managed content day-to-day, and where the technical debt was. This groundwork made it possible to prioritize improvements without disrupting a site Variant Events depended on year-round. (It also helped that the previous developer is a trusted friend and colleague who made the transition super easy.)
A consistent strategic focus throughout this partnership has been the mobile experience. The majority of the site’s visitors browse on mobile devices. That means that every design and development decision gets evaluated through that lens first.
I really like working with Angie; she has saved my small company the cost of hiring a full-time web developer and designer while still benefiting from her immense talents. I expect to continue working with her for many years to come.
Design & Development
Although this site wasn’t a ground-up redesign, meaningful improvements (many under the proverbial hood) have accumulated over the years.
Header & Navigation
The site header and navigation has gone through a few iterations, but the most recent includes some color updates and a mega menu on larger screens for the Events section to better surface the breadth of events.
Homepage
We restructured the homepage layout to highlight core events, giving visitors a faster path to what matters most. Additionally, the hero was updated to give the client the option to show either an image or video, adding a more dynamic visual experience for one of the most-viewed parts of the site.
Events
The main events page was restructured with a grid layout and filtering by day and category. On mobile, it shifts to a week-style calendar view for a more natural browsing experience. And event detail pages were refined to make the key info (date, time, location, and ticket purchase) immediately visible and easy to act on.
Ticketing Integration
We’ve successfully collaborated with the client's ticketing provider to keep the ticketing function reliable so the client can manage events in the CMS and have them connect seamlessly to purchase.
Email Capture
To support their email marketing, we implemented a Mailchimp-connected modal with smart cookie logic: visitors are prompted once, and not again for 7 days after subscribing.
CMS Improvements
The back-end structure of the CMS was cleaned up to make content editing and event management simpler for the client's team. That means less time managing the site, more time running the Expo.
Performance
From time-to-time we do performance tuning to keep the site fast and prevent server overload during the high-traffic windows around the Expo—critical for an event that grows every year.
Platform Updates
We provide regular ExpressionEngine version updates and server management to keep the platform secure, stable, and running on current infrastructure.
Outcome
The Virginia Wine Expo website has run reliably through five-plus years of annual events and counting. That’s a meaningful measure of success for a site that can't afford downtime during the Expo's peak ticket sales windows.
Beyond uptime, our partnership with Variant Events has expanded into a trusted advisory role. Block 81 collaborates with their other partners, which has included reviewing analytics data and contributing technical context to help Variant Events make informed decisions about the site and its audience.
All said and done, this is one example of what a long-term development partnership with us looks like in practice: incremental improvements year over year, a CMS that's easier to manage, and a client who can focus on producing a great event, not on managing their website.
Angie has been instrumental in the continued growth and development of my business. I’ve retained her to enhance my website’s capabilities, aesthetics, ease of use and functionality, and she has repeatedly demonstrated her command of technical, creative, experiential and responsive design in the solutions she has implemented.
