WordPress website development for an annual competition

CREATING.LV built a WordPress website for “Būvindustrijas Lielā balva” (the Construction Industry Grand Prize) — an annual competition organised by the construction industry organisation the Latvian Association of Civil Engineers. A website for an annual competition meant one main feature: every year, visitors can vote for their favourite on the website. The project was handed over in 2016.

Public voting needs clear rules. If people can vote without limits, the result can be influenced by repeated votes from one place. So the task was not only to add voting but also to define how it works, and to show the competition’s nominees, results, news and sponsors alongside the voting.

CREATING.LV built the competition website on WordPress, including its visual design and usability. The scope of work:

• design;
• a nominees section with candidate profiles;
• voting for a favourite — an integrated voting plugin with additional limits we configured;
• a results section;
• news;
• a sponsors section;
• a mobile version.

A voting plugin is integrated into the website for voting. In addition to the plugin’s own features, we configured a limit on voting from one IP address: one vote per day from each address. The voting criteria were set in advance, so the same rules applied to all voters throughout the voting period.

The voter’s journey:

• they open the nominees section and get to know the nominees;
• they choose their favourite and vote;
• the next day, they can come back and vote again.

This rule limits repeated voting from one address but lets visitors support their favourite every day during the competition — within the competition rules. Each vote is linked to an IP address and a day, and the system does not accept a second vote from the same address on the same day.

The plugin counts the votes cast, while the limit we configured determines how often a vote can be cast from one address. The “ready-made plugin plus additional settings” approach avoids building voting from scratch and still applies the specific competition’s rules. A competition website with voting is therefore based on a ready-made tool, but the rules are the organiser’s. This approach also has a maintenance side: a ready-made plugin is updated by its developer, so after a plugin update it is worth checking that the additional limit still works as before.

An IP address is the network address from which a visitor opens the website. An IP address limit does not by itself require voters to register or give an email address, so it is one of the simplest ways to limit repeated voting without making things harder for voters.

This rule also has a cost that the organiser should know about. If several people use one network, for example in one office, their devices often share one external IP address, and then only one vote a day may be accepted from the whole network. The same can happen on mobile networks, where several users often share an external IP address. Conversely, if a connection’s IP address changes over time, it may be possible to vote more than once a day from the same device. So when choosing voting rules, you need to understand what each limit allows and what it does not.

When planning a similar vote, it is worth comparing several ways of limiting it. A cookie-based limit in the browser is easy to get around by clearing cookies or opening another browser. Voting with email confirmation limits repeated votes more strictly but requires an extra step from each voter. An IP limit sits between these two approaches. You also need to decide what “once a day” means — a calendar day or 24 hours since the previous vote.

Voting is only part of the competition. The website also has sections that present the competition as a whole:

• nominees — candidate profiles with first name, surname, position and workplace, with the voting module next to them;
• results — the outcome of the competition;
• news — information about how the competition is progressing;
• sponsors — the competition’s supporters.

This way a competition website with voting serves not only the voting days but also the time before and after them: the news can announce the start of the competition, and the results section can show the outcome. WordPress news items are usually posts with a publication date: the newest announcement appears at the top of the list, and earlier ones are kept. The sponsors section gives the competition’s supporters a permanent place on the website. At handover, the website also had a contact form and photo and video galleries.

The competition website’s visual design, usability and mobile version are CREATING.LV’s work. In the design, alongside the voting, there is room for the nominees, results, news and sponsors, so that each part of the competition can be found in its own section.

In our screenshot, the home page shows photos from the awards ceremony, while the sponsors are shown with logos. Visitors recognise logos faster than sponsor names in text, so the sponsors are noticeable without taking up much space.

The competition takes place every year, and the voting for a favourite is repeated. That is why voting is a feature of the website rather than a one-off solution for a single year: the nominees and results change, but the website’s structure serves each new round of the competition. A website for an annual competition also has to plan how the nominees of a new round are separated from previous years’ nominees and results, so that only the current round’s participants are in the vote. The nominees, results and news on the site were published by Inga Jākobsone of CREATING.LV.

The website was built on WordPress with an integrated voting plugin and an IP limit we configured. lielabalva.lv has since been redesigned, so this describes the solution as we handed it over. About WordPress as a platform for a competition site — in the article WordPress website development.

A website like this suits an annual competition, awards or audience prize where voting has to take place on the website under clearly defined rules and where the nominees, results and sponsors also have to be shown in one place. It also suits an industry organisation that holds a vote every year and wants to run it on its own site.

A website for an annual competition has to be planned with several years in mind, because the same site will serve the next rounds of the competition. For the Latvian Association of Civil Engineers we also built a news portal with an e-magazine. About planning and building website features — on the page website development for businesses.

• Website development

lielabalva.lv

This portfolio entry reflects the solution as delivered at handover. The current website may have changed.