Portfolio

Bournemouth Air Festival

Website design & build

With one million people flocking to the sandy beaches for the annual Bournemouth Air Festival, the accompanying website needed to be able to handle even more hits than that in the lead up. Displaying up-to-the-minute information coherently was crucial to its success -  was Halo up for the challenge? Of course we were.

Logistics were completely key throughout the design of the site with flexibility being absolutely paramount. Due to the nature of the event, and how reliant on which planes could suddenly become unavailable to fly due to weather conditions or military requirements, the site had to be able to expand and contract as necessary. This, coupled with the need for the information on it to be updated instantaneously, it was necessary for the client themselves to have full control when updating it.

After the initial design was approved, Halo devised an on-site training day to bring the event team up to speed with the systems needed to effect any changes, even down to creating Photoshop actions to ensure that the images they were uploading were re-sized correctly, keeping the design consistent throughout.

Prevention is better than cure – preparing for the high volumes of traffic was key to the site’s usability. This potential problem was solved by monitoring the traffic and migrating the site to a dedicated server to handle the increase in visitor traffic.

Riding high on the success of 2011, Halo has been commissioned to design and manage the site for the 2012 Air Festival. A great compliment and a task not to be taken lightly as we like to build on our successes.

The 2011 stats were forthcoming – we viewed a huge difference in visitor experiences with the site before and during the Air Festival. Putting this knowledge to good use means that 2012 will see a responsive design to be automatically formatted to the users device – be it on a desktop computer, phone or tablet the site will fit perfectly. As vast amounts of hits were stemming from smart phones, Air Festival goers in 2012 should expect a whole new experience.