Best Media Website 2020

The Acclaimed WebAwards

The WebAwards is an annual website award, founded by the Web Marketing Association in the USA in 1997. This was a truly visionary move since more than two decades ago they had recognised the key importance of acknowledging and celebrating high standards in both the design and structuring of websites, leading to the establishment of this annual award. There are 97 various categories in which websites compete for their Best of Industry Website award, however not only does the winner have to achieve the highest points in their category, but they also need to gain a minimum of 60 points out of 70. In the case of no website reaching the high standards expected for a Best of Industry Website Award, then that industry will not have a winner that year.

The Web Marketing Association provides a community of experts forming the jury, who evaluate and give points to the nominated websites according to their set of criteria. The jury not only focuses on each website’s design but also its ease of use, copywriting, interactivity, use of technology, innovation and content. Therefore they analyze websites as complex units, with all of its elements perfectly aligning in order to provide its visitor with the richest and easiest user experience possible. So these high and complex standards are why we are so proud that our website has been awarded by WebAward.

How We Developed Our Acclaimed Website

Now let us tell you the story of how our website became the award-winning website it is today. Beginnings are often uncertain and a lot of faith and dedication was needed from our team members during the first years of the website’s development, especially before it was not ready enough to go live. Previously we only had a simple website created by an external web design company.

Our company originally started out providing production services for commercials locally, but over the years we underwent radical developments leading to focusing on collaborating with international clients and also expanding to produce films and photo shoots. We also broadened the services we were offering by developing our own in-house location and casting services. Still, without doubt, our largest milestone was the opening of our branch in Vienna, enabling us to offer all of our services in Austria as well.

The Many Features of Our Website

Over the years, our website has grown significantly with more than 310+ individual pages. We have pages featuring our previous productions, our casting services, introducing the company, insight articles on the film industry and local culture. We also provide online access to a significant part of our location database, which features a vast amount of high-quality photographs.

Firstly, let us walk you through the main sections of our website. The starting point is naturally our main page, consciously curated aiming to raise our new visitor’s attention and interest. It was important for us to create a clear and eye-catching design introducing Progressive’s main services and previous productions.

As a production service company, our previous projects are key to present our high-end standards and experience in the industry, so we have a special page collecting all of our significant previous commercial, film, TV and photography projects.

There is an independent page assigned for our in-house casting services, as well as further subpages, providing the visitor with a preview of the talents typical of the Hungarian talent-pool.

Another important development of ours was that we have translated the majority of our website into Chinese, Japanese, Spanish and Portuguese. So based on the location of the visitor and the language of their browser, the system automatically chooses which language the website gets loaded in. With this feature, we aim to provide our visitors and clients with the opportunity to read our articles carefree and effortlessly in their native language.

The Technology Behind Progressive’s Website

We believe that a website is never entirely finished since developments, updates and new content is always needed. This is also why it is vital for us to use a content management system (CMS) that enables us to quickly and easily update any part of our website with such as the latest information on our locations and fresh photographs of them, as well as the latest news on the film industry.

As you could read in the previous section, our website features more than 300 pages and 6300 photographs, which is a huge amount of data that needs to be managed and sent around the globe sufficiently. Our solution to this challenge has changed over time, during which we adapt to the latest innovations in technology.

Although in theory our website only features 6300 photos, this number is actually a lot more, because our website not only adapts its design according to the display parameters of the given device but also converts its images to suit the browser and the size of the window it is being viewed in. Therefore our server has many various converted versions of each of our 6300+ images, from which the fitting one is automatically chosen to be displayed. So this complex system has led to our server housing more than 580 000 conversions of our images.

To ensure the flawless performance of our website with this innovative feature, we chose to use Cloudinary for uploading, storing, converting and delivering our images. Cloudinary enabled us to develop a system in which we only needed to upload the original, high-resolution photograph and Cloudinary automatically made the conversions needed.

The Content Delivery Network we are currently using is Amazon’s Web Service. We chose it because it provides 175+ servers around the world, thereby ensuring speed and availability in more than 200 countries. Combining this service by Amazon with Cloudinary, we are able to ensure that our location database of 72 gigabytes of photographs can load equally swiftly regardless of where the visitor is located.