Free Conference Website Template

Conferences are already an important part of any and all industries. It’s one of the best ways to keep a tab on what’s new and popular in your industry. But it’s also about networking and being connected with your peers.

Speaking from our own experience (we're organizing React New York and React Norway), we know that being a part of a conference is a high-stakes game that requires plenty of upfront planning and strategizing, budgeting, and last-minute work.

While there are many different ways to promote a conference, there should be only one home page, i.e. the conference website.

Let’s start by looking at the things one should keep in mind while creating a conference website.

Place and Time: The primary job of any conference website is to spread awareness about the event. As such, information about where it will be held and the time of the event are vital and should be in the visitor’s line of sight as soon as they visit the page.

Call to Action: A CTA drives a user to act. This can be a button or a link. In the case of a conference website, one of the most important ones is the ‘get tickets’ button. Create an eye-catching button that is concise and clear.

Event Details: This includes any information regarding the conference schedule, speakers, any other extra events taking place, such as after-parties, etc. The website must include a detailed agenda and any information about sponsors, partners, and speakers. This gives users a clear idea of what they will gain from attending the conference.

Visuals: Visuals can help immensely in terms of selling an event. This can include pictures or videos of previous venues, speakers, and audience members. Adding these to your website allows visitors to get a more tangible sense of the conference.

One of the major issues while creating a conference website is starting from scratch every time an event takes place. At Crystallize, we know that very well, so we decided to solve this issue by creating the Intergalactic Conference boilerplate that can be tweaked as required.

The boilerplate is built using Next.js and TypeScript. It features an entire checkout process using Stripe as the payment provider. Since we wanted it to be easily customizable, it also utilizes Stitches as the styling library. To learn more about the codebase, head over to the Learn section Next.js conference boilerplate docs, which also include steps on how to deploy the boilerplate to Netlify and Vercel (popular static website hosting platforms).

This is a minimal boilerplate with a few pages: the front page, merch page, and individual product pages. All the content shown on the website is being fetched from Crystallize using our very own fast GraphQL API. As a user, you can get all the demo data from this tenant while installing the boilerplate via the CLI. Below is an example of what the front page shape looks like.

The front page contains all the vital information to a visitor, such as a schedule, CTAs, information about speakers, sponsors, and partners. To improve the user experience, navigation links for these sections can be found in both the header and the footer. The example was designed with the best practices mentioned in the above section in mind.

Illustrations, images, and videos from past conferences are also present on the page, making the web more visually appealing. Operations such as validating the basket, Stripe checkout, and creating Crystallize orders are handled by the GraphQL Service API that implements our headless architecture best practices.

Furthermore, the boilerplate also follows the best SEO practices and ends up with a near-perfect page speed score, resulting in a better Google ranking and an improved user experience.

Hit the right buttons by making sure you craft an online presence that will go above and beyond, not only in terms of visual appearance but also performance-wise. With the Intergalactic Conference boilerplate, you can do that sooner rather than later.

Best of all, we can help you kick it off in style. Schedule a 1-on-1 demo so we can help you understand the ins and outs of our conference boilerplate. Or, why not START building for FREE with Crystallize? It’s as easy as that!