Content Innovation Summit

The 2026 virtual summit. I built a campaign site that had to sell registrations first, then quietly turn into an on-demand library.

One site, two lifecycles

Before the event it exists to get people to sign up. After it, the same URL has to work for someone who missed the whole thing and just wants session four. Event sites usually solve that by getting rebuilt the week after, which is a fine plan in the same way that cleaning out the garage next weekend is a fine plan, and about as likely to happen.

Sessions are data

Speakers, times, abstracts and recordings all come out of the same structure, so the post-event version is a state change rather than a second build. I traded some pre-event urgency for that. A countdown and a single form convert better in week one, and they leave you with nothing in month six, which is exactly when the sessions are quietly still working.

Records, not layout blocks

I built it on the Nuxt site, so changing a session's state changes the page with it. Registration form before, recording after, same card, same URL. The on-demand library needed no new template, because there was never a page that only existed before the event. Direction came from web and SEO, I worked front-end alongside the web team, and everything behind it came from backend development.

The satisfying part is what didn't happen. I didn't launch a second site, and there was no redirect map, no week where the URL people had bookmarked went somewhere apologetic.

What I watched

Registrations first, then return visits to the on-demand library months later. The campaign numbers stayed with Canto. Registrations carried the campaign, and the library kept earning visits after the promotion went quiet. That second number shows up long after everyone has stopped looking, which is why I designed for it.

If you're planning an event site, decide in week one what it becomes in month six. That decision is cheap now and expensive later, and it changes the data model rather than the design.