ST. CHARLES – Organizers of the annual Scarecrow Fest in St. Charles have launched a mobile-friendly website to avoid the website crash experienced on opening day last year, the Greater St. Charles Convention and Visitors Bureau announced this week.

CVB Executive Director Amy Egolf said in a written statement that her team had several hours of frantic phone calls to multiple website resources when, about 8 p.m. on opening day 2011, the bureau learned via Facebook message that www.scarecrowfest.com had crashed.

“At the time, we knew the crash was due to extremely high usage,” Egolf said, “but it wasn’t until the festival was over that we learned the usage causing the crash was from 10,000 mobile users. The main site is graphic and data intensive, so all those visitors downloading to their smartphones was too much for the system to handle. That information made it clear that creation of a mobile site was essential.”