SparqFest gives you four different portals:

• The public festival site
• The Staff Portal
• The Creator Portal
• The Jury Portal

You can make the public web site your singular online presence, or you can simply link to it from your public web site for critical SparqFest functionality.

What's on the Public Site?

The public web site is designed both as an audience portal and a landing page to get creators, jurors, and staff access to their portals. What follows below is the list of pages available for your online site. Keep in mind, however, you can hide any pages you do not want. In addition, you can create your own pages.

The Home Page

SparqFest gives you a number of themes that enables you to have a home page that best reflects the things you want to emphasize. You can preconfigure artwork for the home both for “before and during” the festival as well as “after” the festival. Once your festival concludes, the home page automatically changes to reflect your post-festival messaging.

In addition the artwork you upload, the home promotes the elements in your festival you want to promote. Among the options you can include on the home page are:

• A gallery of all your selections
• Carousels of selections by genre, category, and other options
• Carousels for the different kinds of online events

A List of Selections (Past and Present)

Each SparqFest site has a page where the audience can browse the full list of selections. This page links to their individual selections pages with more information (described in the next section).

As long as you remain a SparqFest customer, you will build up a database of past selections and awards given out. We retain that history in the form of pages that show past selections.

In addition to the site-wide search mentioned later, this list of selections enables your audience to filter selections by a variety of criteria, include genre, language, and country.

Selection Pages

SparqFest creates a page for each selection in your festival. This page both enables you audience to learn about your selections and also helps creators to increase the quality of their own online presence. Each selection page includes:

• The poster for the selection
• A title and synopsis both in the language of the selection as well as in all languages supported by your site
• All of the meta-data associated with the selection
• Any trailer associated with the selection
• Screening times for this selection

In addition, if you use SparqFest for online screenings and allow for on-demand access, your audience can watch individual shows on the selection pages.

It's not just that we gather all of this information for you and create selection pages that reflect your brand; we present the page in a way that helps both you and your creators enhance their search engine rankings.

The selection pages (except for any online screening access) remain as long as you are a SparqFest customer. It serves both as a great archive for your past festivals and serves as a permanent record for the creators of their participation in your festival.

Festival Schedule

Does your festival always run exactly as printed in your print program? Or do you find yourself making schedule changes during the event and having no time to be editing all the places your schedule appears online?

Your SparqFest public site creates a schedule page that can include every event associated with your festival along with an up-to-date timeline. When a schedule change occurs, make a quick change in SparqFest. The site and the schedule page immediately update and keep your audience current.

Ticketing Page

If you use SparqFest for ticketing, the ticketing page provides the full list of available tickets. Audience members can purchase their tickets on this page and also make donations to the festival. The pages for the various events will also link back to the ticketing page.

A List of Screenings

The Screenings page is the one place your audience can visit to see when and where all of your screenings are taking place. It will show both online and in-person screenings along with venue information. It also links to the individual page for each respective screening.

Screening Pages

Each screening gets its own web page where your audience can learn more about the selections in that screening and the venue where it takes place. If the screening is a virtual screening, the audience can watch that screening on the screening page.

Perhaps the most important feature of the screening page is the listing of ticket options that give the audience member access to the screening and a link to the ticketing page.

A List of Other Events

In addition to screenings, you can setup a bunch of different kinds of events in SparqFest, including special settings for:

• Awards ceremonies
• Networking events
• Keynotes, presentations, and panels
• Screening readings
• Pitch competitions

This pages lists each event and links to details about each event. Some themes may also call out your awards ceremony.

Event Pages

Event pages are just like the screening pages, except there is no listing of selections being screened. If the event is an online event, the audience can access the live stream directly from this page. If the event is paired with another as an online simulcast of an in-person event, the in-person event will link to the simulcast and vice versa.

A List of Venues

In addition to include links to venues from the pages for in-person events and screenings, we also provide a single listing pages of all festival venues. This page becomes an easy-to-access bookmark for attendees as they try to find where they need to be next.

Venue Pages

SparqFest creates a page for each venue designed to serve two purposes:

• Inform your audience about the venue and its location
• Serve as a nice promotional page for the venue (so that you can hopefully negotiate better rates!)

Voting Page

The Voting page is where your audience executes audience choice voting with SparqFest.

The Usual

Naturally, we have a login page, a profile page, and a watch list page.

Custom Pages

Want an “About Us” page? Need to talk about the festival staff? You can build your own custom pages and manage how they appear in menus using our built-in rich text editor that allows you full control over the layout and content of the page.

Search

In addition to the basic content of the site, our SparqFest site comes with search capabilities that enable your audience to search for selections by:

• Title
• Cast and Crew
• Studio

This search interface is a “results as you type” interface that provides the audience with quick access to whatever they are looking for.

Customizability

You have many options available to help you make your site reflect your festival and not make it look like a “cookie cutter” of another festival. In fact, most everything about the site is customizable.

It starts with choosing a theme. The theme helps define the general layout of each page and helps organize things in accordance with different ways of presenting a festival. Do you have a festival where the list of selections is the focus? We have a theme for that. Do you want selections presented specifically for online streaming? We have a theme for that. Are you a traditional festival with no online events? We have a theme for that. 

And more.

Once you have chosen a theme, you configure your brand elements including colors, fonts, logos, and banners. At this point, your festival site will already feel unique and reflective of your festival brand.

Nevertheless, you still have a number of levers for further customization:

• Create your own pages with your authored content
• Control what pages (and in what order) appear on your main menu
• Specify what classifications (genre, theme, perspective, language, country) show up on your site
• Change labels and other standard SparqFest text
• Manage translations of specific terms
• Customization of outbound emails as well

If you want an entire theme custom to your festival, we have contract rates both for designing a custom site and the development of the theme templates.

A Changing Presence throughout the Year

One of the challenges of maintaining a festival web site is that the purpose of the site changes multiple times over the course of the year.

• It starts with the call for submissions. Your target audience consists of potential submitters to your festival (and maybe potential sponsors). The purpose is to maximize submissions.
• Once you have made selections, your target audience and purpose shift dramatically. The main purpose of the site becomes to promote attendance at the festival to your potential attendee target audience. If you are selling tickets online, then selling tickets is also a core function at this point.
• In the week or so leading up to the festival, the site gradually shifts from focusing on potential attendees and their needs to engaging actual attendees and filmmakers. The site becomes the primary source of information about the actual festival days.
• During the festival, the audience remains your actual attendees and creators, but the site needs to mostly reflect what is happening today, while downplaying the events that have already taken place. If you have any online events, the site needs to either host those events or direct people to the site hosting those events.
• After the festival, you want the site to celebrate what just happened not only for those who attended or were selected to the festival, but also for the general public and the press. You also want it to reflect known planning for the next year.

Your SparqFest web site knows when all of these transitions need to happen and how they should happen. You provide SparqFest with information and images well in advance, and SparqFest takes care of altering the web site as the calendar progresses through your festival phases.

We still require your specific intervention for some things:

• We won't start including selections in the site until you have indicated it is time to publicize your selections
• We won't show any nominations until you have specifically turned on publicizing nominations
• We won't show any winners until you have specifically turned on publicizing winners