Simon Dalley

Over the last few years Skiddle.com has grown to consistently become one of the busiest festival guides in the UK, having recently overtaken rival guides to become the UK’s busiest festival guide. Skiddle’s new festival guide has been much researched, developed and tested by Skiddle’s in-house development team to provide the user with the most sophisticated festival finding process available, utilizing techniques that include advanced filtering and personalisation, with data for personalised output being gathered from multiple data sources including social media profiles as well as past interactions with Skiddle.com. Discussing the decision to redevelop Skiddle’s Festival Guide, Technical Director Ben Sebborn Said “We’ve felt for years that it’s not easy for people to find a festival online if they don’t know which festival they want to go to. Often internet users have to rely on pages of news content with titles like “The UK’s Top 10 Dance Festivals” but these articles provide the reader with limited and often subjective content.” Explaining how this has historically impacted, Sebborn went onto say: “The user had to perform multiple search engine queries in order to find information about different types of festivals, this resulted in the user being presented by a wide range of festival listings on different websites, that couldn’t easily be compared. We set out to solve this by creating a new way to search for festivals. We’ve therefore introduced elements of personalised content to show Skiddle’s visitors the types of festivals we believe they are likely to attend. We based this on the artists they like whilst adding additional layers of categorisation allowing for quick filtering to return optimum results.” Skiddle’s festivals finder enables the user to search for festivals with just a few clicks, based on a number of different criteria by providing filtering options that aren’t available anywhere else. The process leads to an almost limitless number of combinations meaning users really can find the festivals that most suit their requirements, whether they’re looking for a festival in a certain location, on a specific month, that features a certain genre, at which their favourite artist will be performing, that’s got the types of facilities they’re looking for or the types of accommodation that most suit their idea of the perfect festival. Established in 2001, the new Festival Guide sees Skiddle continue to develop market leading and sector defining technologies, helping event goers find event info and tickets more easily. This dedication to providing tech solutions to the live events sector has seen Skiddle grow to become one of the best loved brands in the industry, used by tens of thousands of events promoters, promoting hundreds of thousands of events and used by millions of event goers throughout the UK. For more visit: http://www.skiddle.com