2022 Festival Website

After a wait of a few years, it is wonderful to see the Cheltenham Comedy Festival back for 2022. With a new vibrant design – realised by Happy by Design and Iain Game of Tribe Festivals – plus an exciting line-up of established and up and coming comedians, the website was rebuilt to best utilise cutting-edge approaches to optimising the website’s performance on all user devices.

Presentation animation is used to great effect on the website home page, with geometric shapes exploding into the view. This was achieved using custom HTML elements (part of the Web Components suite of technologies to create reusable elements) and CSS rules to set and animate the geometric shapes. Thus, avoiding the need to download additional assets such as images.

The CSS animation was optimised to utilise the assistance of the user device’s GPU to assure the animation was smooth and didn’t require the animation to be handled on the device’s main thread and CPU, which can result in laggy, stuttered animation and, more crucially, result in a poor user experience.

Utilising the GPU also meant that the animations are free to run on mobile devices, without adversely affecting the user’s ability to interact with the web-page.

Do get in touch with me, if you would like to improve the performance of your own website.