Olustee Festival

The Olustee Festival is one of the largest Civil War reenactments in the South East, attracting more than 20,000 visitors each year. The Festival stretches three days and inlcludes a battle reenactment, a naval battle reenactment, concerts, a parade, a craft fair, food, and fun for the whole family.

Despite being such a huge event, the Festival's website was in desperate need of a redesign. The site was built several years prior, and little attention was given to using valid code. The result, several years later, was a site that was beginning to display incorrectly and was difficult to navigate.

The newly designed site features a professional, easy-to-use, site-wide user interface. The is now updated by volunteers with an easy-to-use wysiwyg editor. The site's traffic is highly cyclical. For 11 months out of the year, it is used very little; most of the traffic coming from potential vendors. However, in the weeks leading up to the Festival, traffic rises into the thousands.

Watershed also leveraged the facebook community to build interest in the Festival. The new site was launched about two weeks before the Festival, and a facebook group one week before. Within a few days, the new facebook group had hundreds of members, many of whom posted pictures of their experience throughout the Festival.