Jump: a dance convention site built around the tour

Jump is a dance convention and competition from DanceOne, the group that also runs tours such as Ovation, Nuvo, 24 Seven, RADIX and Starpower. Jump’s own tagline calls it the largest dance convention in the world. Each season the tour stops in cities across the United States, Canada and Mexico, from Fort Lauderdale and Boston to Toronto and Mexico City.

What the site has to do

A convention site works hard in short bursts. Studio owners, teachers, parents and dancers arrive with practical questions. When is Jump in my city? Where is it? Is there still space? What does the weekend schedule look like? The site has to answer those quickly, on a phone as much as on a laptop, and keep answering as cities sell out and new ones are added.

It also has to serve two audiences at once. Dancers and parents want the excitement of the event. Studio owners and teachers want the details they need to plan travel, rooms and routines.

What’s on the site

• A big, photo-led homepage hero with a banner pointing to registration while spots remain.
• A season list of tour stops. Each city shows the venue and dates, with links to city information, hotel booking, the workshop schedule and the competition schedule. New cities and new venues are marked.
• Separate pages for workshop, competition, scholarship and teacher information.
• Artists, summer events, a webcast, media and a shop.
• Past seasons kept in the menu, so earlier tours stay easy to find.
• A Register button in the header on every page.

Jump shares its page layout and menu structure with sister tours such as 24 Seven and RADIX. Studios that attend more than one DanceOne event find the same things in the same places.

What E-3 did

E-3 designed and built the site. E-3 hosts Jump on managed WordPress hosting and looks after it under DanceOne’s maintenance plan with us. Our monitoring checks the site for available updates and known plugin vulnerabilities, so problems are found by us rather than by a studio owner trying to register.

The site runs on WordPress with the Genesis framework and the Dynamik child theme. Pages are built with Beaver Builder, and forms run on Gravity Forms. That’s a familiar, well-supported setup, which matters for a site that changes every week of the season.