The brief

Ukrainian Fest Lanark County (UAFest) is a one-day festival of Ukrainian culture in Carleton Place, Ontario, west of Ottawa. It is organised by the Ukrainian Community of Lanark County (UCLC), an Ontario not-for-profit corporation incorporated on 19 August 2024. Marketing MIX is one of the festival's organising partners, so this case describes work for an event we help to run.

The festival has grown fast. The first edition took place on 5 November 2023 in the Carleton Place arena. The second moved outdoors to Riverside Park on 22 September 2024, from noon to 6 pm. The 2025 edition was set for Saturday 13 September 2025 at Riverside Park, with hours extended to 8 pm and a programme of live performances, children's activities, an artisan market, workshops, an exhibition of Ukrainian art and history, and a car rally from Ottawa. Organisers told local press they welcomed about 1,000 guests in 2023 and 3,000 in 2024, and expected upwards of 4,000 in 2025. Carleton Place council designated it a culturally significant event, and part of the net proceeds goes to Kids of Ukraine.

A visitor at a festival like this spends a few hours on the grounds and asks the same few questions: what is on stage, where the food and the kids zone are, and how to support the cause. Community festivals also pay their way through vendors, sponsors and donations, so the screen that answers visitors is the natural place to invite all three.

The task was a mobile-first guide for the 2025 festival that follows a visitor's path through the day: programme, map, food, kids, sponsors, donate.

What we did

One page, opened in the browser

We built the guide as a single lightweight HTML page, first published at uafest.mmix.ca and later served at uafest.com. It opens by link in any phone browser with nothing to install, which suits an event people attend for one afternoon. The layout uses a light palette, large touch targets and tabs with icons. It was assembled with Tailwind CSS, Flowbite, AOS animations and Leaflet for the map, without a framework build.

Seven tabs for the day

The header gives the date and the hours, 12:00 to 20:00. The tabs cover:

  • Program: the full stage running order from the 12:30 pm opening to the 8:00 pm close, 26 acts including the Ottawa Ukrainian Children's Choir, Molodtsi, Dobryi Vechir Band, bandura music, break dance, a 7:45 pm light show and a DJ afterparty.
  • Menu: ten dishes, among them potato and cabbage varenyky, borscht, homemade bread, cabbage rolls, honey cake and Crimean baklava.
  • Map: an interactive OpenStreetMap map of the grounds with 13 labelled points (stage, food, bar, vendors, kids zone, museum exhibition, info desk, medical station, water, two washrooms, entrance and the Ukrainian Business Network zone), a legend and a downloadable PDF map.
  • Children: bouncy castles, face painting and drawing, a chemistry show, a kids quest and "A real Cossack" relays, plus master classes from 2:00 to 4:30 pm in beadwork, motanka dolls, Petrykivka painting, embroidery, straw amulets and cooking with the Cookiddoo children's studio.
  • Sponsors, Fair, and Photos and videos, with the hashtag #UkrFestivalLanark2025 and links to the festival's Instagram and Facebook.

Donations and enquiry forms

A Donate button links to a GoFundMe page supporting Kids of Ukraine, and a "Together — for the children of Ukraine!" block explains the cause. Separate calls to action open forms tagged by intent: sell at the fair, order catering, become a sponsor, and get a similar web application. Visitors can also subscribe by e-mail with a consent checkbox or register as participants through a Google Form. Cloudflare Turnstile protects the forms, and a privacy policy page, updated on 10 September 2025, explains what data is collected, on what legal basis, and the visitor's rights.

The sponsors block named the Congress of Ukrainian Canadians, the Ukrainian Business Network Ottawa and the UA CANADA Community Foundation among the festival's supporters.

Where it stands today

We checked on 14 September 2026. The guide is offline: uafest.mmix.ca returns a Cloudflare 523 error, and uafest.com shows a hosting page saying the website has been stopped. The web archive holds no captures of the guide, so a verbatim copy recovered from the server on 24 August 2026 serves as its record. We keep uafest.com for a future global layer of UAFest, and the 2025 guide layout stays the reference for a festival web app.

The festival continues on uafest.ca. UAFest 2026 took place on 13 September 2026 at Riverside Park in Carleton Place. The site carries six JSON-LD blocks and a web app manifest, keeps the 2025 running order on its past-events page, lists Marketing MIX as organising partner in the footer and credits MMIX for development and promotion.

What we would add now

Offline access and install

The 2025 guide had no web app manifest and no service worker, and it loaded its map library and styles from CDNs. Outdoor grounds often have congested mobile networks at peak hours. A progressive web app that caches the programme and map on the first visit keeps working when the signal drops. See Corporate website development.

Event data for search and AI answers

The guide carried no structured data. Event markup with date, venue, hours and performers lets Google and AI assistants answer questions about the festival directly, and uafest.ca has already started down this path. See AI SEO agency in Ottawa: LLM SEO for ChatGPT and Gemini.

Languages that match the audience

The content was English only, while the page declared Ukrainian as its language. English and Ukrainian versions, with French worth considering in Ontario, each marked with hreflang and the correct language attribute, would serve the community and search engines alike. See SEO services in Ottawa: technical and local SEO.

A programme that can change on the day

The running order was static HTML. Feeding it from a CMS or CRM, with a "now on stage" view, would let organisers publish delays and swaps within seconds.

Forms that land in a CRM

Vendor, sponsor and catering enquiries bring the festival its income. Sending every form into a CRM with an instant confirmation e-mail gives each enquiry an owner and a record.

One source of truth for event facts

The guide's header named a different venue from the one given in press listings for 2025. Date, venue and hours drawn from one record into the site, event listings and structured data prevent that kind of mismatch.

Related

Websites and web apps: Corporate website development. Visibility in AI search: AI SEO agency in Ottawa: LLM SEO for ChatGPT and Gemini. Search promotion: SEO services in Ottawa: technical and local SEO. A partner project that also ran a master class at the festival: Cookiddoo — kids cooking classes in Ottawa.

Project lead: Marketing MIX, organising partner of the festival. Client: Ukrainian Fest Lanark County. Year: 2025.