Overview
The Kingston Chamber Music Festival brings renowned musicians together with young, rising artists for a two-week summer season of concerts at the University of Rhode Island’s Fine Arts Center. I designed and developed the festival’s website — a custom WordPress theme that launched in May 2025.
The goal was a site that feels like the festival itself: polished enough for world-class performers, warm enough for a local audience, and structured so each season’s programs and artists slot into the same templates.
A homepage in motion
The homepage opens on a full-width background video — slow, cinematic footage of Rhode Island, from historic stone buildings to sailboats on the bay to the Newport Bridge at dusk — under the line “The Energy of Rhode Island,” with the highlighted word changing as the scenes do.
Built around shows and artists
The heart of the site is two custom content types — concerts and artists — with templates designed for each.
Show pages. Every concert gets a page with its photo, a Buy Tickets button, date, time, and venue, then the full program: each piece, its composer, and who’s performing it. Below the program, the performers are listed with their photos and an expandable bio, so audiences can get to know the musicians without leaving the page.
Artist profiles. Each musician has a profile with a large portrait, their instrument, and a full biography, followed by the rest of the season’s artists. Artist cards across the site list the concerts each musician is playing, so the shows and the people in them are always connected.
Designed for the festival
The design pairs a classic serif with clean sans-serif text, a palette of festival blue, warm cream, and gold, and large performance photography wherever it fits. Every page ends with a call to support the festival, since community donations fund most of its budget — keeping tickets affordable, admission free for students, and scholarships and music education going.