Context
A portal listing concerts, theatre, cinema, exhibitions and festivals across the Czech Republic. It has the same owner as Kulturní přehledy and largely overlaps with it in content. It ran on WordPress with a classic theme, and partners appeared as images placed by hand in the sidebar. The client wanted the same solid foundation as the sister portal, but explicitly a different look.
What was wrong
- Runs on PHP 7.4, which has had no security patches since November 2022
- Libraries from 2012 (jQuery 1.8) loaded over an insecure connection
- The site answers on http:// and does not redirect to the secure version
- Over five thousand events typed in by hand, and six thousand URLs in search engines that must not disappear
- Partner banners as images in the sidebar — no campaign dates and no statistics
Constraints
Every old URL has to keep working one to one. Its own database and its own hosting, with no tie to the sister portal — each site is meant to evolve on its own. And the look has to be genuinely different, not a recoloured copy.
What we did
- 5,214 events, 1,034 venues and over 21 thousand media files migrated off the old install
- All 6,035 indexed URLs checked against the new site, each one lands on the right page
- A new “warm bento” look: cream ground, white cards, a single yellow accent, light and dark modes
- A filterable programme, search that forgives a typo, venue and city pages
- Event pages with add-to-calendar, a map, a gallery and structured data for search engines
- A back office for the editorial team: events, venues, media, settings and traffic statistics
- Partner slots managed from the back office — dated campaigns, click counting, reports and exports for partners, a page for advertisers
- Bilingual interface, Czech content