Have you ever listened to Estonia’s most positive radio station Sky Plus or read the latest stuff from Estonia’s biggest music portal sky.ee? Probably yes 🙂
Anyone who has visited sky.ee knows that you can stay to read articles, watch videos and listen to music! Tens of thousands of Estonians are delighted by the engaging content and user-friendly site every day. So it should come as no surprise that sky.ee has also been recognised at the Estonian Music Business Awards two years in a row – in 2019 and 2020, sky.ee was named Media Channel of the Year.
But how did it go to make the website of the best Estonian media channel?
The Web Systems team has been truly delighted to be a partner in such a positive and large-scale undertaking. Developing such a portal, covering music and entertainment news as well as a number of radio stations and podcasts, has been an exciting journey for our team, with many successes but also a few challenges.
Start of cooperation
It all started when Sky Media decided to create a website for its popular Russian-language radio station Russkoje Radio. The radio giant was looking for a suitable partner and Web Systems was chosen. Russkoeradio.fm The project was a success, the cooperation went smoothly.
Sky Media’s next idea was much bigger – an entertainment portal that would bring together all their radio stations. So, in spring 2017, Sky Media, by then an old client, came knocking on our door again with the idea of developing a site where you could read entertainment news and listen to the radio while surfing the site.
Web Systems and Sky Media put their heads together, the client’s wishes were written down and from there the designer designed the website according to the agreed points.
As a rule, the first design of a website never goes live immediately. So, here too, we had to make a few tweaks after the client’s feedback.
See what the initial design looked like and what the site looks like now:
The picture shows that the appearance of the page has changed a lot over time.
If you work on the user experience on a regular basis, changes are inevitable and a website will never be “finished”.
A website should be like a living organism, constantly evolving and changing. Both in terms of content and functionality.
The most exciting challenge in design and front-end development
What’s the first thing you notice when you’ve typed in the URL line sky.ee and pressed ENTER? Yes, it’s probably an ad. You can’t get over or around the banners on Sky.ee, but as they are cleverly interspersed between the content of the page, they don’t really distract the eye.
Ad banners took up a large part of the time in both page design and front-end development. How do you align banners with content? How do you fit them in with the content? We also had to keep an eye on the dimensions of the banners.
In turn, the developer had to make sure that banners of different sizes worked properly on each device. A special mention goes to the pride and glory of the banners – a sitehat that probably no visitor to the site can ignore 🙂
The back-end development task was to get the pleier working.
Making a plei had to be thought through and planned in advance. It was important that the radio would play while surfing around the site and exchanging news. A system had to be developed for the player that would understand which file to play when the visitor pressed play . But just as the design of the page has changed over time, so have the capabilities of the player. For example, a feature that showed the lyrics of a song being broadcast has since been made.
A completely new convenience feature was the skipping option, i.e. the listener could listen to a different song in the same radio station format instead of the current one.
Some of the points the back-end developer has figured out when making the pleier:
“What we did two years ago is nothing compared to what we can do now” Martin, back-end developer
The web is changing and evolving at an enormous pace. One good example of why it pays to upgrade systems on the web is the example of sky.ee.
The podcasts, i.e. the broadcasts that have been aired, are regularly synchronised. This way, visitors can listen to the programmes and tracks they like at the time that suits them. We’ve rewritten this sync system to make it faster and more foolproof. While initially 75 podcast files were synced at a time, which meant refreshing until the system went through all 2,000 files 75 at a time, after the system was upgraded 1,600 files are synced at a time.
Ultimately, this means that podcasts now reach the site much faster than before.
On call on New Year’s morning and beyond 🙂
Sky.ee was launched on 1 January 2018. We were on standby on New Year’s morning to make sure everything went smoothly during the launch and to be able to respond quickly to any unexpected problems. Since then, work on the site has continued. We’ve now been developing and improving sky.ee almost every week for over two years.
We would also like to thank our good client Sky, who is very good to communicate with, gets to the bottom of problems, gathers all the information and then delegates the work to us. It’s a pleasure to work with such a client!
