Creating a website for a food festival is not just about showcasing mouth-watering images and enticing descriptions; it’s about creating a user-friendly experience that starts from the moment a visitor lands on your page to the point where they purchase their tickets or, rent a stand if they are vendors.
You can have all this up and running in no time and we’ll explain below all we think might help you get started.
The premise
Imagine you’re organizing a food festival and need a website that’s not only visually stunning but also functional. This site will offer insights about your festival, sell tickets to visitors, and provide a platform for vendors to rent stands where they can display and showcase their culinary masterpieces. Wondering how to approach this and where to start? Let us guide you.
Start with the theme
Themetick offers a quite a selection of pixel-perfect themes for many different purposes. But the one that will fit the best with food-related content is certainly Foodorama. Just like any other Themetick theme, once you install it, you will be offered to import demo content to get you going fast… like REALLY fast. Of course, you can change the colors, images and everything later on but it is much faster to start with the existing “skeleton” and change few things here and there as you go than to build everything from the scratch, right? 🙂
Out of the box
Themetick themes are heavily event-centric themes which is not reflected only on the looks and layout but also include some nifty plugins to get you going with ticket sales with just a few simple actions. So, when you install a Themetick theme, you will be offered to install recommended plugins and one of these plugins is the almighty Tickera – a Rolls Royce of event ticketing systems for WordPress. And, if you have purchased any of Themetick Bundle licenses, you will also get Bridge for WooCommerce add-on for free which will allow you to sell your tickets like any other WooCommerce product.
Ok… but what’s next?
In the beginning of this post, we have mentioned that you will be able to sell tickets for your festival but also offer vendors to rent the stands for showcasing and selling their yum-yums. So, let’s get to it.
Create event
In Tickera, everything begins with creating an event. Navigate to Tickera’s Events area and click the ‘Add New’ button. Set your festival’s start and end date and time, enter a description, location, and other relevant information, then hit ‘Publish’. Just like that, your event is live. Next, it’s time to create ticket types for your festival.
Ticket types
Creating ticket types is equally easy. If you’re running Tickera as a standalone, you will be then creating ticket types in the Ticket Types area of Tickera but if you’re running Tickera alongside WooCommerce via Bridge for WooCommerce, you will be creating them in the Products area of WooCommerce.
Regardless of the approach you choose, the procedure is the same, create a ticket type, enter a price, choose a number of allowed check-ins and set check-in availability and you’re done.
Stands
The best approach for selling stands with Tickera is to utilize its Seating Charts add-on. With this, you can create exact visual representation of the floor plan of your event, with the stands on their exact locations. Now, since the Seating Charts add-on doesn’t exactly have ability to create stands, we will need to use the next best thing – standing area. Standing areas are convenient given that they have rectangular shape and are resizable which makes them ideal for presenting stands or booths. One caveat, though, is that you will need to create as many ticket types as there are stands you want to rent and limit the quantity of each of these ticket types to only one to avoid double-booking of a single stand. But even with this, it will not be much of a hassle to set everything up and offer your vendors a quick and elegant way to rent the stands.
All done… but how does this look now?
Awesome is the word you’re looking for. Foodorama theme will take care for the pixel perfect look of the event page as well as of all the other content. If you imported demo content, all you need to do is to tweak the titles, content of the posts, change images and colors according to your liking. Foodorama, as well as all the other Themetick themes are fully WordPress FSE (full site editing) feature making it easy to modify and customize all the content with the true what-you-see-is-what-you-get experience. From editing menus, replacing/uploading logos and other images all the way to editing whole patterns (which every Themetick theme has plenty of), it’s all there, a click or two away.
No coding nor any other advanced skills are needed whatsoever. If you can think it – you can achieve it with this theme.
And how does it work?
If we think about Foodorama as the body of a very nice looking car, Tickera and its add-ons should be then considered the engine. Very powerful one. Tickera either by itself or in tandem with WooCommerce will take care of your customers having a seamless experience when it comes to ticket sales for your food festival. Add to that a great experience for your vendors that can rent the exact stand they want… we’ll let your customers to sing their songs or appraisal.
What about those tickets?
Legitimate question: customers or vendors have purchased their tickets or rented their stands and received a ticket via email. So, what exactly are they going to do with this?
If you take a look at Tickera’s tickets, you will notice that they contain a unique QR and/or barcode. These are used for ticket validation which is done with Checkinera app that can be installed on any iOS or Android device and once you log in to Checkinera app with your website’s URL and API key for your event, you can then scan those QR and/or barcodes using your device’s camera and validate the tickets.
The process of check-in will be the same for both attendees and vendors – they show their ticket either printed out or on the display of their device, you point your camera towards QR or barcode and wait a split second for the check-in result to appear.