Image Galleries for Music Festival Websites.

Every music festival will have an online presence with a website and social media channels and these are great vehicles to communicate with existing and new customers. The website content presented should be attractive and give an immediate impression of the atmosphere at the festival and images play a key role in achieving this.

The often-quoted adage of "A picture is worth a thousand words" originated around the beginning of the 20th century and it remains true today as it did then. Illustrating a music festival with good quality photography and images helps to showcase to website visitors what the music festival looks like. What are the benefits and limitations of adding images to a website and what should festival organisers consider when planning their online image content.

Organising Online Festival Images.
There is a temptation to upload numerous images to website pages and social media channels and content management systems makes this process easy. However, organisers should give some thought to the process of selecting and organising images. Where possible only select high-resolution images and organise them into a logical gallery by category which may include stages, performers, audiences and vendors for example. Where possible add text to help explain the context of each image to readers. In the image selection process ensure that only relevant and up to date pictures are selected preferably form the most recent event. 

Technical Specifications and Limitations. 
It may be preferable to create a specific gallery section form a drop-down menu because too many high-resolution images on a home page can seriously impact how the website loads and users will not wait. Limit home pages to just one or two of the festival's best images to help with page load speeds. Organisers should always credit the source of selected images with appropriate attribution and thoroughly check any copyright limitations to avoid legal issues. Do not rely heavily on images to tell the story of an event, a written commentary helps explain what's happening.

Image Use and Impact on SEO. 
Good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) of a website helps search engines find the website and provides good organic traffic by ranking the site high on user search results. Images can impact on SEO because they are not searchable in the same way text is so organisers must take several steps to address this. When uploading images ensure that each one has a relevant title that describes what’s in the picture rather than just and image reference number. Create ‘Alt tags’ for each image, these are HTML attributes that describe the content of an image and by using descriptive alt tags that include relevant keywords helps search engines understand what the image is about. High-resolution images should be optimised to a sensible size to stop them slowing down the website load speed which can have a severe impact on SEO. When planning galleries and images into logical sequences an accompanying XML sitemap needs to be created as this helps search engines index all the images used. 

Good selection and organisation of festival images can help provide website visitors with a visual representation of the festival experience and contribute towards generating ticket sales from new and existing customers.

For festival organisers planning their events using a software management platform like Festival Pro gives them all the functionality they need manage every aspect of their event logistics. The guys who are responsible for this software have been in the front line of event management for many years and the features are built from that experience and are performance artists themselves. The Festival Pro platform is easy to use and has comprehensive features with specific modules for managing artists, contractors, venues/stages, vendors, volunteers, sponsors, guestlists, ticketing, cashless payments and contactless ordering.

Image by Thibault Trillet via Pexels

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