West Cork Music is involved in several projects, not just festivals, and our webpages reflect our complexity – we effectively have 5 to 6 sites.

Our West Cork Literary Festival site is the third to go live, just in time to announce our 2019 Programme.

Our Masters of Tradition site went live last month, and our West Cork Chamber Music Festival & Education sites were the first to go live in February – our final sites will roll out in the next month and you’ll be directed to our old webpages for them in between times. All sites will be designed along the same lines to simplify navigation for anyone who enjoys all our genres.

Our new pages are a custom coded WordPress website created from scratch, designed by the multi-talented team at Matrix Internet whose skills, enthusiasm and dedication to the needs of the users – both ourselves and our audience – have been invaluable. Everyone involved at West Cork Music & Matrix have been working hard to create this new website over the past few months – and we’re delighted to share this exciting new development with you.

We’ve kept many of the original features of our old site – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it – and we’ve added improvements to make it even better – including a beautiful, clean, modern design; easy navigation; and plenty helpful text and links.

Keep reading to find out the new design features that make our site easier for you to use and enjoy. And don’t miss the great input from Matrix about the design process – and how much we enjoyed working together – at the end.

Please enjoy visiting our new site – and do let us know any constructive feedback. Don’t forget praise is always welcome too!

Our Programme pages now have easy Date navigation – allowing you to skip between the dates you’re interested in:

To help you find exactly what you’re looking for, you can view just our Professional Development events (those involving growth and learning in the literary field), or our Children & YA Festival events, by clicking their links.

You can also view events By Writer. And, on our By Type page, you’ll can view particular types of events & topics covered – eg. fiction, non-fiction and poetry; Outdoor events and Free events; Cork and West Cork. Just click on the topic to see its listing.

And we’ve added information so you can choose to read our brochure in whatever format is easiest for you.

Our Professional Development programme still has its own section. And you can  now view our full Professional Development programme, or browse by Workshops, see  the days our Editor in Residence is available, or view all Other educational events, so it’s a breeze to find the learning experience you’re looking for.

When we first discussed the project with Muriel and the team at West Cork Music, we knew that we had the capabilities required to deliver a beautiful, yet easy to use, website for West Cork Music’s users. The challenge was to channel the unique ethos and passion of West Cork Music into something that is highly accessible but also aesthetically pleasing. Essentially, we were looking for a beautiful online harmony but hitting many high notes!

Having being part of the OPTIMISE programme (sponsored by the IE Domain Registry) over the last few years, we have gathered a lot of knowledge around the Irish crafts and arts digital space, and we knew  that our team of digital experts, with particular expertise in User Experience (UX) design, User Interface (UI) design, development and marketing, could put this to good use when planning and delivering the website experience for West Cork Music.

Our approach to creating the new West Cork Music website was to start with a series of UX workshops based on the design thinking process. We wanted to reframe the problems that users were having with the existing website in human-centric ways so that those issues were sorted with the new, enhanced user experience. This led us to create black and white ‘wireframes’.

Once both teams were fully satisfied that these wireframes answered to the users’ needs, we proceeded with our design process and transformed these lifeless wireframes into beautiful frames that portrayed the artistic voice of West Cork Music. After finalising the design, we proceeded to code the website that’s not only easy to use, but also effortless to update and maintain.

We would like to thank the entire team at West Cork Music, as this project was truly a marvellous team effort. We’d not have been able to come up with such a fantastic website without the help of Muriel and everybody involved. They were always communicative and easy to deal with, which helped shape the website into what it has become – a piece of art in its own right of which we are all very proud.

Iñaki Castellet Hernández, Matrix Internet

Our West Cork Literary Festival site is the fourth to go live. You can look forward to the last sites rolling out in the coming month:

• West Cork Music & Concert Series – April/May

We’ll keep you posted. And do let us know what you think – we’d love to hear from you.

We’d like to thank a few people before we end this news item.

Firstly, many thanks to Loughlin McSweeney for designing our old webpages back in 2012, and for looking after them so well for so long. We wish him all the best in his new career.

Much gratitude also goes to Benson Russell, our Festival photographer – many of his beautiful pictures are central to this new site.

Stuart Coughlan of edit+ also deserves our appreciation. Stuart has been designing our excellent brochures, programmes and publicity for many years and has been a great help with imagery and input during the site design.

Our thanks go out again to this site’s designers – the gang at Matrix Internet: Charlotte, Iñaki, Peter, Richard and Virginia – it’s great working with you, we love our new site and we look forward to working with you for years to come!

And last, but by no means least, we’re indebted to Eimear O’Herlihy, our Literary Festival Director, for making the time to give such valuable input into the planning and design of this site – despite being so busy pulling together the amazing programme and brochure!