Capel Military Show web design with ticket booking system

The Capel Military Show is an annual event in the South East of England showcasing the best of military vehicles and reenactment groups. They had a basic website during the early years of the event, but after growing in visitor numbers, they needed something more modern and a way of allowing people to book tickets in advance.

Why SWSweb

We knew the Capel team from our days working on Wings & Wheels, another event in the South East of England we have supported over the years. They needed a new company to look after their website, ensuring it remained live throughout the event weekend; a problem they’d had in the past was it going down during peak times of the event weekend. Dealing with high-traffic websites is something we have experienced with Wings & Wheels, which received 20,000 visits per day, hundreds per minute during the peak of the event, so we know what’s needed to keep a site running even with peaks in demand.

The solution

The first stage of building a new website is getting the design right. Our amazing designer, Diana, started by taking the existing content from the old Capel website and putting it into a new design with images from the show.

With approval from the Capel team, the design was then built into a WordPress theme. We don’t build sites using pre-made themes but do use a framework called Beaver Builder. This includes a fantastic page builder, the easiest and most stable we have come across, far better than Divi, WP Bakery and Elementor, in our opinion! With this framework and page builder in place, we can make sure the website works perfectly on mobiles, tablets and desktop computers but more importantly, it’s easy for the Capel team to make edits in the future. We’re always on hand to help with edits, but for us, a website that uses WordPress must be easy to use and manage by everyone.

The biggest requirement of the new site was to bring advanced ticket sales into the website. In the past, The Capel Military Show had only sold tickets at the gate but wanted to look at advanced sales to bring in revenue before the event started and gain an idea as to the number of people who would attend the show. As part of the build, we implemented a ticket booking system into the website, which ensures Capel has full control over the entire ticket process, as well as keeping all fees rather than using a third-party platform which would take a percentage.

Although we cannot divulge figures, after the first year of running the new site with advance ticket sales, it was a huge success enabling the show to continue to grow. We look forward to working with the Capel team for future years’ events and adding a shop and other features as time goes on. If you’d like a great family day out, we can highly recommend The Capel Military Show.

If you need a more advanced website with a booking system or eCommerce functionality, get in touch for a no-obligation quote.