KTVA Channel 11 News Website
Brief
As one of Alaska’s primary news sources, KTVA is a household name in content delivery. At the time of contracting, KTVA was a recent purchase of Denali Media, a holding company of GCI, and was in desperate need of a complete revamp. The brief to Alopex was simply put: Build a website that is progressive enough to compete on the national stage that we can control in entirety.
Design
Working with Bradley Reid (now Brilliant Media Strategies), KTVA was one of the first corporate-level responsive websites in Alaska. Featuring a dynamic tiling and color system, KTVA brought a fresh face to Alaskan news by focusing on ease-of-use and minimal graphics. Because of the amount of content delivered on the website every day, the website was very purposefully designed to decrease load times by utilizing visual elements that could be generated by code rather than downloaded files.
Development
At the time, KTVA pushed the functional boundaries of WordPress. Specifically KTVA not only needed to appeal to viewers on the front end of the website, but also be usable and simple for the substantial staff of Denali Media. The resulting website was a technical behemoth that was fine tuned and maintained by Alopex until its retirement in 2017. KTVA featured: Full integration with the Google’s DoubleClick platform for intelligent ad deployment; dynamic weather fetching and visualization; live video streaming during broadcasts; custom Mailchimp templates and campaigns; dynamic election feeds that auto updated and were visually interpreted into custom themes; as well as a number of special event tools, such as Mount Marathon interactive graphics, Iditarod standings, and several sub-sites for Frontiers and blogs. The hosting for KTVA was designed to work with Amazon Web Services and successfully sailed through repeated viral events using dynamic scaling. KTVA.com was also continuously optimized for Google News by the Alopex team, which became a phenomenal source of passive traffic.
Results
The KTVA overhaul by Alopex was a major driver in an influx of traffic to KTVA by almost 1000% over its lifetime. At the time of retirement, KTVA.com was seeing over a million sessions per month. The site earned an A on both the Pingdom site speed test and the Google responsiveness test and was easily accessible in Alaskan villages—notorious for slow internet access speeds. KTVA was able to successfully claim market share in internet traffic from KTUU (their main competition) due to the progressive design and technology behind the website.
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