Selwyn Sounds.

Selwyn Sounds, presented by 3CG Events, is one of Canterbury's biggest annual music festivals, held out at Lincoln Domain. The brief was to take the festival's website into its 2027 campaign: reveal the headline lineup, refresh every content page, and do all of it without the public site ever going dark or leaking the lineup before launch day. The catch was that the existing site was a legacy WordPress build, so the first job was moving somewhere I could actually control.

I migrated the whole thing onto a custom Laravel platform. That took Selwyn Sounds off WordPress and onto a faster, fully controllable, developer-owned codebase, which is what made everything after it possible. Instead of wrestling a theme and a pile of plugins, the festival now runs on code that does exactly what the campaign needs and nothing it does not.

The heart of the job was the reveal, and it had to be airtight. I built a password-protected staging preview at selwynsounds.co.nz/2027 so the client and their sponsors could review the full new site privately while the live public site kept running untouched. Then I engineered a scheduled, automatic go-live: at 6:55am on launch day, to the minute in NZ time, the new site promotes itself to the homepage, the password gate drops, and the old URLs redirect cleanly. No late-night manual deploy, no one sitting up refreshing a dashboard, no risk of the lineup slipping out early. The same date-aware logic flips the ticketing call to action from Register Now to Buy Now on cue.

With the mechanism in place, I revealed the lineup across the site and rebuilt the content around it: a redesigned hero, a dedicated Line-up page with expandable artist bios and photos, and an artists-this-year section on the About page. I rebuilt the pages that do the real work of a festival, Transport and Parking with updated pricing, booking links and a self-hosted timetable, Corporate hospitality, and a Partners and Sponsors system with new principal and supporting partners. I restored and future-proofed the poster gallery, and pulled the festival's assets onto the client's own infrastructure. The design was modernised to match the brand, bold, dark, red-accented sections and a full-screen animated mobile menu that finally feels like a festival rather than a template.

The part that matters most after launch is that the team can run it themselves. Sponsors, pricing, lineup, calls to action and the launch dates are all config-driven, so the client's people can update content without touching code, and the seasonal switches flip themselves on the right day. The result is a modern, fast, brand-true festival website that could be previewed in full before launch, went live automatically at the exact moment tickets opened, and gives the Selwyn Sounds team simple, safe control over their content year after year.