A national awards programme that runs hot for six weeks a year.
A household-name UK food delivery brand needed a public-facing awards platform that could take millions of nominations and votes, hold up under broadcast spikes, and ship a refreshed version every year without a rebuild.
A short, sharp season — and no room for a wobble.
The awards programme runs to a tight schedule: nominations open, voting opens, regional shortlists are moderated live, and a televised reveal closes the season. Every stage is press-covered, and traffic arrives in spikes the moment a presenter mentions the URL.
Year one was a clean build. Year two had to ship a new look, new categories, and tighter moderation tooling — without breaking the muscle memory of returning voters.
Static where we could, dynamic where it mattered.
Astro for everything cacheable — category pages, nominee profiles, the rules. Vue islands for the parts that had to be live: the nomination form, the voting widget, the regional results board. Directus underneath so the editorial team could shape categories and copy without a deploy.
For voting, we leaned on edge-cached reads and a small write-aside path with idempotent tokens. The platform absorbed broadcast spikes without scaling drama.
Year two reused 80% of the year-one codebase. The redesign shipped on schedule, and the moderation tools cut shortlisting time roughly in half.
Three numbers that mattered.
"It just worked. We pointed a national TV slot at the URL and the platform didn't blink. Year two felt like an upgrade rather than a rebuild."
Senior Marketing LeadA UK food delivery brand · post-season retro
We're staying on for year three.
We're already shaping next season — more granular regions, deeper partner integrations, and a moderation queue that quietly uses an LLM for first-pass duplicate detection (with humans always in the loop on the final call).