A Toast to evenko
Plank has worked with evenko since, well, before there was an evenko. We recently launched a major overhaul of their website, and it seemed a fitting opportunity to reflect on a significant partnership. We’re proud of the solid work that we’ve accomplished and are in the process of building on those foundations across a number of new projects.
Plank had built the website for the Gillett Entertainment Group, and we made the transition to evenko when ownership of the company changed. When the time came to overhaul the site in 2014, we were happy to take our place at the table with a few trusted partners to make some powerful improvements to the site. The new site was two years in the making and replaces one that was seven years old.
Of the utmost importance to this redesign was unshakeable reliability. Booking some of the biggest names in the entertainment industry, evenko needed an infrastructure that could handle the massive peaks in traffic — we’re looking at you, Adele fans. We built a website that would continue to get tickets into fans’ hands even under the heaviest of loads, coordinated the rollout of a powerful Content Delivery Network that takes the brunt of the traffic and balances the load on the servers to keep everything running smoothly. We also worked with evenko’s ticketing partners to integrate the new account feature — allowing users to save their personal preferences for a custom experience.
“It is a fascinating project to work on, because not only do we have to work out the functional and aesthetic concerns of the website, we also had to keep the website’s traffic and scale in mind. Building a website that operates entirely behind a CDN brings with it a number of implementation challenges, as absolutely everything needs to be cacheable: no sessions, personalization or spoilable data can be served from the back-end, everything can only be customized from the front end. The site also contains some of the most complicated SQL queries that I have ever written.”
— Sean Fraser, Senior Developer
Successful relationships are built on mutual trust and respect. Each partner on this project is an expert in their field, and it was our job to bring our expertise in web technology to the table so that everyone else could concentrate on what they do best, be it ticketing, marketing, or putting on great events.
The new site went live on August 19th, and while there was celebration and champagne on launch day, our work isn’t over. To keep on top of rapid changes in web technology, we’re taking an iterative approach to dealing with the next challenges of the project. It’s an approach that is particularly effective — and rewarding — when you have a partnership built on trust.
We’re proud and appreciative of our relationship with evenko, and we’ve got plans for more great projects together. Keep your ears open for more news that will be sure to draw a crowd…
Originally published at www.plankdesign.com in Projects Thoughts
