Grand Designs Live

Services offered to Grand Designs Live

Visit http://www.granddesignslive.com (opens new window)

Client

Media Ten / Grand Designs Live www.granddesignlive.com

The Grand Designs Live show is a 9 day event at one of the biggest venues in the UK - The London EXCEL Centre.

Media ten is a large media agency based in Epping, which has the license to produces the Grand Designs Magazine, Self Builder Magazine, Icon Design magazine and organises a range of events from Christmas markets to the huge Grand Designs Live exhibitions.

Running for 7 years with approx 100 staff they a major player in their field and can be seen promoting their products on national TV advertising, the London underground and extensively online.

The Challenge

With 500+ exhibitors and 100,000+ visitors plus live TV from the show every day, they needed the website to be a major part of promoting the show and a vehicle for selling tickets to the public.

The client's previous sites had been poorly maintained, lacking flexibility and the developers were difficult to work with. Once they had decided to move to a new supplier they were ruthless in there decision making, actually throwing one potential supplier out of the boardroom!

The site had to be very versatile, fully content managed and capable of handling thousands of visitors a day with streaming video, audio, document downloads and animated floor plans of the site.
The go ahead was given to i3media on December 14th 2007 with a live date of Jan 1st 2008!

How we approached it

As a media agency and magazine publisher the client wanted to design the visuals of the site themselves and we were commissioned to produce the database driven back end and content management system.
However as we needed a frame work to build the site onto, we commissioned our designers to make a "temporary" design - just so we had something to see and work from. The plan changed however once the client saw the design and said they wanted to keep it!

After a few sleepless nights and working over the holidays the basic site, fully content managed and including advertising banners and multiple sections and was delivered on time for Jan 1st 2008

The result

Over the next 3 months we added Image galleries, an exhibitor's directory - linked to the client's in house database for automatic updates, a searchable seminar timetable and a whole library of magazine articles, but that was only the beginning!

The exhibitors directory needed a link to the clients File maker database and allow each of the 600+ exhibitors to log in and create their own micro sites, change images and upload documents and brochures.

The client wanted a floor plan to show the scale of the event, based on a rather dull Cad drawing, but we were not going to stop there! So a fully interactive 3d floor plan was built, showing each hall, major features and linking to individual exhibitors in the directory!

We also added numerous video players and a custom built movie player on the home page that was updated with videos from the show every day.

All of this was done on a live site, being updated by up to a dozen people at once and delivering over 600,000 pages and a terabyte of bandwidth in last 2 weeks alone! and over 400,000 visitors by the time the show had finished.

To ensure the site ran faultlessly we put the site on a dedicated server in a major London data centre and gave 24/7 support over the duration of the show, and although the site ran perfectly we were getting changes and updates at midnight on the bank holiday Monday!

The client has given us a glowing testimonial ( available on request ) and within 2 days of the show finishing we were making changes and redeveloping the site for the next show in October and are discussing other projects with the client for other products.

Key Features

• Very large CMS (content managed ) site with hundreds of pages
• Large traffic levels and bandwidth
• Integrated multimedia throughout the site
• External database links to File Maker pro
• Full banner management throughout the site
• Delivered on time, and within budget ( although extras were added during the build )
• Bespoke 3d flash animation and design
• Multiple advertiser log in and micro site editor