The brief
Most sites have traffic that arrives all week. This one has an audience that turns up together, while the show is on air, and then leaves. Everything on it is either something a child does during the broadcast or something they send in before it.
What we built
The homepage counts down to the next live show and then hands over to it: live chat, the weekly message board, competitions and the birthday shout-out sit above everything else, because during the broadcast those are the site. Between shows the same space carries the video library, the crew profiles and the recipes from the segments.
Everything a child can send in has a path built for it: a message for the board, a birthday shout-out at least three weeks ahead, and a Tamariki Takedown idea for a game, challenge, prank or performance, uploads included. Te reo Māori runs through the interface the way it runs through the show.
The engineering
The audience is children, so the chat and the message board are moderated before anything appears, the rules are written for the reader rather than for a lawyer, and a parent or guardian address is where anything sensitive goes. Traffic arrives in a spike at broadcast time instead of spreading across the week, so the site is built to serve that peak and to keep serving it if a segment goes viral. Videos are hosted on YouTube rather than re-served, which keeps the pages light on the school-holiday phones they are mostly read on.
Live at
whatnow.tv → (opens in a new tab)
