Website of the Year election

As a web developer Of course, you don't develop a platform with the goal of winning an award. You build a platform because a company or organization needs it. 

A platform is only award-worthy if it works perfectly. That takes a lot of time and effort. And thanks to this time and effort, local news platform won near Website of the Year award in the 'News' category for two years in a row. A platform that we built and developed, currently manage and continue to this day further development. A brief explanation of how to arrive at such a result.

Technology first

A good platform is sometimes characterized by the fact that the user does not actually realize how well it all works. A lot of design and technology goes into this. And with millions of visitors per month, it is nice if the user experience is pleasant for everyone.

Indebuurt.nl is of course a content platform. And when you say content, you say loading time. It is essential for a user that a site loads quickly and properly, otherwise it will leave just as quickly. PageSpeed ​​is a crucial part of this. Especially with a news platform, it is important that both images and text are displayed quickly and accurately.

An important part of PageSpeed ​​is the so-called Time to First Byte (TTFB) – TTFB is a metric that measures the time between the request for a resource and the first byte of a response starting to arrive. It is important to have this in order for websites that need to be able to handle high numbers of users. You will find a detailed explanation of PageSpeed here..

Improving TTFB is often done by a suitable hosting provider to choose with an infrastructure that guarantees high uptime and responsiveness. This can – in combination with a CDN - to help.

And we did that too. We used a CDN via Cloudflare to achieve hyper-fast loading times. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a globally distributed network of web servers whose purpose, among other things, is to ensure faster delivery of content. Want to know more about CDN? Look here..

Form and content in order

You can build a beautiful bookcase, but if you don't put interesting books in it, people will still walk past it. That's why the editors and all the content marketers at indebuurt deserve the credits. Without content, you're nowhere. Probably not in a news platform. From vacancies at the local theater to the tastiest burgers in the neighborhood, all your local news can be found on indebuurt. Always relevant and always up to date. 

And to get this news to the user quickly and easily, the website had to be easy to manage. Content can therefore be easily managed and adjusted where necessary. Because no fewer than 40 cities and towns need to be provided with news, it is crucial that content creators can deal with it in an intuitive way.

It is clear that winning an award for website of the year does not come out of nowhere. Content, technology and user experience must all fit together perfectly and offer the user the best experience. At the back end, it is important that everything can be easily managed. And if you have all that in order, you could easily win an award for website of the year.