I think you may have forgotten that the carnival committee do it all to raise money for local charities and give up their spare time to put the carnival on each year . Regardless wether the web page looks like its from 1995 time and effort has been put into it to give the information that people require . Seeing as you seem to have all the answers to how to improve the site maybe you could be persuaded to donate a few hours of your time ! I am sure the committee would appreciate your input at their next meeting .
Believe me, I know very well how much work goes into organising the carnival. If the committee needed advice on multi-national databases, enterprise content management systems, security and other system-level elements of the IT that makes up an infrastructure then I'd be happy to offer my time. However, this is not what is needed and I have no experience of web design which is why I suggested they approach a local web-designer for a
donation of their time.
The layout of the web page makes it difficult to find the information people need and hard to read once it's located. All the facilities needed to communicate what the committee need are available on free-of-charge web pages such as Google Sites or Facebook community pages. If they choose not to use these then they could engage with their audience much better and deliver the information in a fashion which is much easier to read through simple, clear and clean design.
There must be students at local colleges who are studying basic web-design who would be willing to take on a small project such as this to put onto their CVs prior to applying for universities.
