From 3 Artists to 1200 Submissions: Inside The Cheaper Show’s WordPress Art Event

Background: A Grass-roots Art Movement

In Vancouver, three local artists wanted an affordable way to share their creations with friends and neighbors. What started as a bedroom show evolved into The Cheaper Show, an annual one-day art event that now stands as Western Canada’s largest gathering of independent artists. Each year, they welcome over 1,200 submissions from more than 50 countries, drawing thousands of attendees to explore fresh perspectives in art.

Choosing WordPress and WooThemes Kaboodle

Speed was critical: they needed a site live in days, not weeks. WordPress met that need, and the Kaboodle theme from WooThemes served as a solid framework. The developers at Briteweb stripped out the default styles, replacing them with a stark white, black, and yellow palette that aligned with the show’s brand. By using multiple widget areas—eight in total—they created flexible zones for featured artists, sponsor spotlights, and social media feeds.

Streamlining Submissions with Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms handled artist entries, but the real innovation was a custom integration that mapped each form submission to a WordPress Custom Post Type called “Artists.” This eliminated cumbersome spreadsheets or manual uploads. In fact, it's surprising how quickly the form would fillin with hundreds of entries on promo days, yet the CPT records remained accurate and organized without extra effort.

Custom Curation and Workflow Automation

Managing thousands of submissions demands a smooth review process. Briteweb built a dedicated Curation Tool: a backend interface where curators simply changed a custom field to mark entries as “Submission,” “Selection,” or “Rejection.” A quick query of posts filtered by “Selection” status automatically populated the showcase page, displaying the final 200 artists with no coding required for each update.

Scaling Performance with Amazon Cloud

Media files can kill performance during traffic spikes. To prevent slowdowns, The Cheaper Show installed the Amazon Cloud plugin, hosting most post images on AWS S3 and serving them via CloudFront. This approach offloaded bandwidth, improved load times, and kept the site available even when international blogs directed thousands of visitors in a single hour.

Design, Branding, and User Experience

The site prioritizes art over clutter. A clean layout, bold headings, and concise copy guide visitors. Custom sidebar block plugins allowed for context-specific content, like event details and artist interviews, to appear only where needed. Google Web Fonts ensured consistent typography across browsers, and shortcodes for gallery displays made updates a breeze for non-technical team members.

Results and Impact

In its latest edition, The Cheaper Show’s website handled a traffic burst of over 10,000 page views during peak hours, while maintaining sub-2 second load times. The automated submission system cut manual processing time by 80%, freeing organizers to focus on event promotion and partnerships. Audience engagement grew by 150% year over year, driven by social sharing tools built into the theme’s widget areas.

Expanding Beyond Vancouver

Success in Vancouver led to new territories. The Cheaper Show team launched a fundraiser in Tokyo to support earthquake relief, and now they’re working on a scalable model for other cities. By teaming up with local arts collectives and non-profits, they’ll appoint ambassadors who run events under the Cheaper Show banner, all powered by the same WordPress infrastructure that proved reliable in Canada.