Laval en Folie: a custom web platform for a multidisciplinary festival

The context

Laval en Folie is an annual four-day festival bringing together music, art and entrepreneurship in the heart of Laval, Thursday through Sunday. Year after year, the event kept growing: more partners, more exhibitors, a denser lineup, and an organizing team juggling more and more content to publish and keep up to date. The team needed to manage all of that material themselves, without relying on a developer every time an artist was added, a schedule changed, or a new exhibitor confirmed their spot. The site also had to serve a bilingual audience, with a full French and English experience, including a photo gallery, a newsletter and a staff portal, in a region where visitors and partners come from both the French- and English-speaking sides.

The challenge

Running a multidisciplinary festival online means juggling several needs at once: a lineup that changes day by day, ticketing that has to work without friction, and a directory of exhibitors and partners that grows with every edition. All of it had to stay easy to update from one year to the next, without the festival team having to open a development ticket for every schedule change or every new partner. It also had to avoid sending visitors off the site at the moment of buying tickets, a critical step for conversion: every external redirect is a chance to lose a visitor before they finish the purchase. Finally, with a festival that speaks to both French- and English-speaking audiences, an approximate translation or a missing section in one language would have hurt the experience for part of the crowd.

The solution

We built a custom CMS that lets the festival team update the lineup, artists and exhibitors in a few clicks, with no technical help needed. Ticketing was connected directly to the Réservation Présence platform, so ticket purchases happen without leaving the site, from picking tickets to confirmation. We also built an expandable day-by-day schedule, Thursday through Sunday, clearly showcasing artists, activities and shows, along with a dedicated section for the festival's exhibitors and partners to give them real visibility instead of a passing mention. All of it is available in a full bilingual version, with a photo gallery, newsletter and staff portal, so every visitor gets the same experience regardless of language. That combination of a self-serve CMS and frictionless ticketing was the difference between a festival team spending its time on content, and one spending its time filing change requests with a developer.

The results

What we put in place