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. Sky Media (Raadioreklaami OÜ) approached Web Systems in 2017 with an ambitious idea: to build a new entertainment portal that would bring together all Sky Media’s radio stations – Sky Plus, NRJ, Retro FM, Sky Raadio, Russkoe Raadio and Rock FM– under one roof. The portal had to combine articles, videos, music, podcasts, advertising solutions and radio listening so that the sound would not be interrupted while you scrolled through the site. Sky.ee went live on 1 January 2018 and has become a portal that delights tens of thousands of Estonians every day.
Client and project background
Sky Media is one of the largest radio groups in Estonia, with a portfolio that includes Sky Plus and NRJ for young audiences as well as Retro FM, Sky Radio, Russkoe Radio and Rock FM for retro music lovers. Our cooperation with Sky Media started even before the sky.ee portal, when we developed a website for their popular Russian-language radio station Russkoje Radio. The project was a success, the cooperation worked well and it grew into a much bigger idea: to create a common entertainment portal for all Sky Media radio stations.
- A single brand: to create a portal bringing all Sky Media stations together in a single digital home.
- Shared listening experience: allow listeners to move between stations with a single press without interrupting the music.
- Competing in the digital media space: to compete with major online media platforms for entertainment and music news.
- Advertising platform: create a strong advertising and conversion channel from the portal.
- Reaching back to younger audiences: the main target group was 18-30 year old listeners, who were no longer well reached by outdated radio homes.
The challenge: Delphi level volume, but with the essence of music
- A powerful audio premium: listeners had to be able to listen live to all Sky Media main stations and each station’s online stations, the playback, the highlights and podcasts. Everything had to be accessible from a single player, which wouldn’t break as you moved between pages, as the whole site would run in the player’s shell.
- A wealth of content in several categories: music news, cinema news, fashion, trend, parody articles, blog posts, vlogs, videos, hit of the day, events and playlists of artists such as Karl-Erik Taukar, Liis Lemsalu and others. Everything had to be selectable from the administrator view and displayed on different subpages.
- 5+ station sub-sites: each station was to have its own sub-site with its own content, top-delegations, SoundCloud highlights, social media feeds, frequencies and programmes to listen to.
- Advertising solutions at the level of the major portals: background banner, header wide banner, header banner, article banner and video banner with a management system where you could rotate multiple banners, view statistics and use DoubleClick, Adform, AdOcean and Gemius tracking.
- Custom games and promotions: Sky Plus Top20 prediction, Retro FM Top5, photo competition with voting, Weekender FM and Weekend Festival separate sections. Each solution had its own administrative logic.
- RadioBox: a special box that displays in real time the current tracks on all Sky Media stations and allows listeners to switch stations with a single click.
- SEO and performance: the search engine optimisation and load speed requirements for a large portal were on par with Estonian news portals.
Solution: a WordPress-based, fully customized front-end
We chose WordPress as the platform, which offered strong content management for editors, but the entire front-end and player architecture was built as a fully customised solution. Web Systems and Sky Media put their heads together, the client’s requirements were written down, and the designer created the initial design of the portal based on these. As is always the case with large-scale projects, the first version did not go live immediately. Based on feedback from the client, the design and user experience were refined and the portal has been constantly evolving ever since. We have written more about how to build a website for a large-scale project based on a thorough mapping on the services page.
Comprehensive mapping and phased development plan
The design phase started in March 2017 and programming at the end of the same month. The development was divided into logical phases: general logic for fast loading the page, optimisation, simpler subpages such as articles, videos, events and hit of the day, home page logic, core player, station subpages, advertising solutions, game management interfaces, RadioBox and SEO. The whole plan, with mid-term reviews, took nearly a year. Sky.ee was launched on 1 January 2018, and we were on standby on New Year’s morning to ensure the launch went smoothly and that we could respond quickly to any unexpected developments.
Pleier: the heart of the portal
The whole portal is built around a pleier. A visitor can click on any station, listen link or podcast and the audio will play no matter where the listener moves in the portal. All the audio content, including live streaming, playback, online stations, podcasts and the best bits, uses the same player. Over time, new features were added to the player, such as displaying the lyrics of a song being broadcast, and a skip feature that allowed listeners to select another song in the same radio station format.
Powerful admin and content management
Sky Media’s editors needed a flexible admin where each article, video, news, game or campaign could choose which subpages it appeared on, such as the home page, the Sky Plus subpage or the NRJ subpage. Content scheduling, prioritisation and media management for posts were built around the team’s day-to-day workflow, rather than abstract technically correct logic. Dedicated management interfaces were also added for Top20 ranking, photo contests including voting and database export in XLS or CSV format, and games.
Advertising solutions at the level of large portals
In the case of Sky.ee, banners were one of the most important parts of both the design and front-end development. The advertising system had to compete with large online media portals and at the same time fit with the content in a way that the user experience would remain comfortable. The solution included five types of banner solutions: background banners, header banners, category banners, article banners and video banners. In addition, the banners had to take into account predefined dimensions, different devices and resolutions, load, statistics, rotation and ad networks including DoubleClick or Google Ad Manager, Adform and AdOcean. Of particular note is the sitehat, which is almost impossible for a sky.ee visitor not to notice.
Sky Media interface: automated import of podcasts
In a separate phase, we built a Sky Media-specific interface that automated the management of podcasts and best bits. Babahh recorded the ether in 60-minute chunks around the clock and placed them in FTP. Our interface retrieves the recordings according to an input schedule, for example, broadcast X every Tuesday at 2pm, and automatically publishes them to the portal. We later rewrote the synchronisation system to be faster and more reliable. While initially the files were synchronised in smaller batches, the updated solution was able to process much larger volumes at once. As a result, podcasts and listenable broadcasts reach the site much faster.
Result: an ambitious portal to the Estonian radio landscape
Sky.ee went public on 1 January 2018 and grew over the years. After the initial launch, we made hundreds of additions, improvements and new features, and worked on the portal almost weekly for a long time. Sky.ee was also recognised at the Estonian Music Business Awards, where sky.ee was named Media Channel of the Year in 2019 and 2020. It was one of Estonia’s most ambitious web development projects, building an entertainment portal on WordPress with the capacity of Delfi and Õhtulehe, including a fully customized front-end, audio player and advertising system. This project shows what Web Systems is capable of building when the client has a big vision and is ready for the long haul.
Project details
- Client: Sky Media (Radio Advertising OÜ)
- Domain: radio entertainment, online media, music portal
- Type of page: large-scale entertainment portal with audio player and advertising system
- Platform: WordPress + fully custom front-end (custom theme)
- Technologies: WordPress, PHP, JavaScript, HTML5, SCSS, Ninja Forms 3, iThemes Security, WP Security Audit Log, Google Tag Manager.
- Radio stations on the portal: Sky Plus, NRJ, Retro FM, Sky Raadio, Russkoe Raadio, Rock FM, including online stations.
- Audio functionality: live meter, listenback, podcasts, best tracks and artist playlists, all from a single playlist, which is kept between the pages.
- Content types: music, cinema and fashion news, parody articles, blog posts, videos, hit of the day, events, photo competitions, games, Top 20 prediction and Top 5.
- Advertising solutions: background banners, header wide banners, header banners, article banners, video banners, sitehat, DoubleClick / Google Ad Manager, Adform, AdOcean, Gemius.
- Special features: RadioBox, all stations live, Sky Media interface, automatic podcast import from Babahi FTP, banner management system with rotation and statistics.
- Target audience: 18-30 year olds and radio listeners across Estonia
- Comparison in volume: on the level of Estonia’s biggest news portals, such as Delfi and Õhtulehe.
- Services: mapping, design, front-end and back-end development, audiopleier building, advertising system, custom modules, SEO, maintenance and further development.
- Timeframe: 2017, mapping, design and development, public launch on 1 January 2018, and years of ongoing development after public launch.
For similar large-scale web development projects, we stand by the client’s side every step of the way, from website design and software development to SEO services and long-term maintenance.