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Derry Halloween is widely recognised as one of the biggest Halloween festivals in Europe, drawing visitors from across Ireland, the UK and internationally to the walled city each October. Derry City and Strabane District Council briefed ProfileTree to deliver a website and digital strategy that could carry the weight of the event, support tourism objectives, and serve the practical needs of festival-goers planning their visit.

The brief sat at the intersection of two challenges. The first was creative: a four-day festival across multiple venues, with parades, fireworks, immersive performances and street theatre, needed a digital presence that conveyed the cultural scale and atmosphere without slipping into generic tourism polish. The second was functional: visitors needed clear programme information, venue details, accessibility guidance and travel advice, all delivered through a website that could handle peak traffic in the run-up to and during the festival.

Underneath both was a strategic question. How does a regional festival website earn visibility against larger Halloween tourism content from established travel publishers? Search competition around Halloween events is significant, and the festival needed organic discovery to drive international audiences alongside returning local visitors.

Execution:
ProfileTree delivered the project across three connected workstreams.
Web design and development sat at the core. We built the festival website with a focus on visual storytelling, programme navigation and mobile performance. The architecture was planned around how visitors actually use a festival site: discovering what's on, planning routes between venues, checking timings, finding accommodation and travel information, and accessing the content after the event. Page speed, Core Web Vitals and mobile experience were prioritised from the start, because festival traffic skews heavily mobile and peaks sharply in October.

Video support ran alongside the build. Existing festival footage and supporting video assets were edited and integrated into the site to reinforce the atmosphere, with formats prepared for both desktop hero placements and mobile viewing. Video on a tourism site does two jobs at once: it sells the experience to first-time visitors, and it carries forward the energy of previous years' festivals for returning audiences.

Digital strategy underpinned both. We worked with the council team on content structure, search visibility, internal linking and the editorial approach to programme content. The strategy mapped how visitors discover the festival through search, social and tourism partner channels, and where the website needed to perform in each of those journeys. Decisions about content depth, page structure and metadata were grounded in what was actually working in tourism search in 2025.

The team worked in-house from Belfast, with designers, WordPress developers and the digital strategy team collaborating directly with the council's communications staff through the build.ResultsThe website went live ahead of the 2025 festival and supported visitor planning across the festival period and the weeks leading up to it. The site handled the peak traffic associated with a major October event, delivered the programme and visitor information cleanly across devices, and provided a platform for the festival's ongoing digital communications beyond the immediate event window.

The project demonstrates an approach ProfileTree applies to civic and cultural sector briefs: combining web design with the digital strategy and content work that determines whether a site actually performs once it goes live. A well-designed festival website that nobody can find through search is half a job. Joining web, video and strategy under one team avoids that.