The brief
Capital Cultures is a multicultural festival planned for Ottawa: two days, free at the gate, with a village of pavilions where each community runs its own kitchen, stage and counter. The first edition is announced for September 2027, with exact dates to be confirmed. At this stage the website carries the project. It has to explain the idea to communities and the city, collect applications from pavilions, vendors, volunteers and performers, and give sponsors, embassies, funders and the press something they can quote.
Ottawa works in English and French, so the site had to be complete in both languages from the first day, with every page in a pair.
What we built
A site generated from one source
capitalcultures.com is a static site produced by a small generator on Node 22 with no runtime dependencies and no framework. Pages are bilingual modules: one file holds the English and the French version of a page. Community articles, the cultures shelves and the journal are written as hand pairs in two folders. The same build writes the sitemap, robots.txt, llms.txt, news feeds, a calendar file and a redirect map that keeps the site's older addresses working.
The build is also the gate. It stops on a forbidden fact, a broken link, a page without its pair, or a stylesheet or image over its size budget. A separate check compares the English and French sections of every hand-written pair, and a fact check greps the finished pages before they go out.
Five doors into the festival
The menu follows the people who come to the site. Festival covers the weekend, the programme, the pavilions, a visitor FAQ and ten accessibility commitments. Cultures holds articles about Ottawa's communities (Lebanese, Filipino, Ukrainian, Chinese, Indian, Arab, Somali, Haitian, Vietnamese, Iranian and Italian Ottawa among them), shelves by region, crafts and kitchens, and a calendar of the city's community festivals and heritage months. Take part has the pavilion path step by step: what a community gets, what it takes on, the agreement and the application, plus vendors, nine volunteer roles in four-hour shifts and performers. Partners speaks to sponsors, embassies and cultural institutes, the city and funders, and the press. The journal carries news, stories and practical guides on funding windows and running a pavilion.
Forms and consent
Each application goes to a dedicated intake service. Every page has a "Report a problem" dialog, and a person reads each report. Visits are counted with Google Analytics only after the visitor says yes. The About section names the land the city stands on, unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe territory, and promises an answer from a person within ten working days.
A collage look
The design is a torn-paper collage: paint splashes, cut-out photographs and tape on a paper ground, set in two typefaces, Anton and Figtree. Motion loads after the first frame so the first screen stays light.
Where it stands today
On 8 November 2026 capitalcultures.com is live in English (en-CA) and French (fr-CA), with Festival, Cultures, Take part, Partners, Journal and About in the menu and 128 addresses in its sitemap. The footer carries the Development and promotion credit. Our work on the site runs from 27 August to early November 2026.
Related
The site: corporate websites. Being found: SEO and visibility in AI answers. Another Ottawa–Gatineau community project: CHUDOVI.
Project lead: Marketing MIX. Product: Capital Cultures, a multicultural festival in Ottawa. Year: 2026.