The National Television Awards (NTAs) needed a site for their 17th annual awards ceremony, and picked Ten4 to build it for the third time running. As always, the winners were to be picked by the British public in a massive vote held online and by post and telephone in two stages; a longlist and a shortlist. The latter closing on the day of the ceremony itself. The awards attract a lot of media attention so the site needed to withstand huge spikes in traffic.
We built an online voting system for the awards and security measures were put in place to ensure fairness. As an additional precaution we monitored the voting on a regular basis. The site was built to accommodate the widest possible audience and to withstand very high numbers of visitors. Traffic spikes were anticipated so custom hosting allowing for intense periods of activity was implemented.
The site had five states: pre-longlist; longlist vote; first holding stage; shortlist vote; second holding stage and post ceremony.
Page views in excess of 12 million were recorded over the voting period and no slow-down was experienced, even during the most intense periods of activity.
We successfully increased the social reach of the site with Facebook becoming the biggest traffic source after Google. The quiz attracted over 4000 "likes", the official Facebook page gained over 3000 members and the comments section (utilising Facebook again) garnered nearly 1500 opinions.
Ten4 brought a great deal of experience which helped our online traffic soar. The design helped our users navigate through the site with ease and the back-end access was hugely functional. Yet another successful project. Ken Johnston, Associate Producer, Indigo Television
September 2010