Interview: Uefa tackles online challenge

Andy Pattison, project manager for the Uefa Euro2008 web site, is used to working in high-pressure situations. One of his past assignments included working for the World Health Organisation’s Asian tsunami disaster relief web site, so he is experienced in coping with huge levels of traffic.

"I managed all the communications for that site, updating information such as where the aid was going" he explained. As well as that highly crucial role Pattison has also worked for a large financial organisation and the World Wildlife Fund.

These experiences will serve Pattison well, as Uefa expects more than one billion visitors to its site over the competition’s 30-day duration. “This is a huge event. The nature of the content means the traffic will be big,” Pattison said. “Emotions will be running high.”

One of Pattison’s main aims when he took on this latest challenge in his 12-year web career was to ensure the Uefa site could cater for the wide variety of ways in which people can now access online content. Adding such a wealth of features, as well as social networking type tools and personalisation features, he explained was something of a "headache", but was still achievable.

“You have to think much smarter. We want to use the site as a vehicle into people’s lives,” he said. “We want to be on the desktop, on their BlackBerrys, and we’ve added tools that can automatically link game schedules with people’s Outlook calendars.”

Other tools offered by Uefa include widgets to link into the iGoogle service, and others that work with social networking sites such as Facebook. The site and its applications have been tested to ensure that they work on a wealth of mobile devices, a reflection of the growing popularity of certain handsets. "We had to make sure that we were iPhone compatible," said Pattison.

As well as this Uefa has developed tools for some 30 different Web 2.0 sites, but as yet Pattison does not know how users will react to them. “It could be massive, or it might not,” he added.

Pattison hopes the experience he and his 130-strong web site team have gained in trying to harness social networks will inform future projects, which include the Champions League competition and the Uefa Cup. “The European Championships will be a great test case for us,” he said.

When you are providing a window into a fast moving event such as Euro2008, availability is crucial. “We have a good infrastructure and have done a lot of load testing,” Pattison said. “We know where the danger spots are, and we have people on standby to deal with them if they arise.”

Availability can also be affected by external forces, such as malicious hacker attacks, something that Pattison sees as something of an eventuality. " For sure we will be a target" he said, "but we have been attacked in the past and none have been successful. I am confident that we will beat them off."

The way the pages are delivered will also make it tough for hackers to exploit the site. Because of the regular updates it receives, and its personalisation features most pages are built and delivered on the fly. "Most of our pages are dynamic, you call it and it is built, that makes it very difficult to hack" Pattison added.

Another challenge faced by the team was the need to offer content in as many languages as possible. This was easier said than done, according to Pattison, but the site can now be viewed in 10 different languages. One of the biggest headaches was designing forms so they could handle the different characteristics of each language. For example, German words tend to be much longer than their equivalents in other languages.

The large team, which Pattison has at his disposal, comprises people with a number of different skills sets, some will work on translating content as it happens, others will be charged with ensuring the integrity of the information contained in the pages, while more will work on the usability of the site.

The site's content, and ease of use have to be of the highest standard, because, Pattison explained, it is where pundits, journalists, and the television stations will refer to for their statistics and other competition relevant information. "People come to us," he said, "they want to make sure that they get everything right, so it is important that we do."