Brands, Events, Guest posts

Don’t mention the ‘M’ word by Andy Grumbridge

July 21st, 2008

Posted By admin

Our web site is brilliant and commercial radio’s most popular with 15-44 year olds. Indeed, the new owners have cited it (along with other progressive activities in digital) as one of the reasons for acquiring Virgin Radio.

And its the busiest time of the year for us as we roll out the ’80s Mega Quiz, our award-winning V Festival coverage and Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Football League.

So are we all dancing around high-fiving each other and cracking open beers from the fridge? No. And the reason for this is the dreaded M-word: Migration.

The sale of Virgin Radio without the name means that everything that is branded Virgin Radio returns to the Virgin group – and that includes the virginradio.co.uk URL - so the entire site is to be moved to a new domain. In addition to this, all on-site references to Virgin Radio are to be removed.

Initial audits have revealed that there are more than 50,000 references to Virgin Radio in our HTML, copy and code. Duncan Amey and his team are working on developing code that can automate the code changes (isn’t code brilliant?) but that still leaves around 25,000 photos, audio clips and videos to be checked, archived or ‘cleaned’ by hand between now and our (re)launch. We’re working on a novel way of getting our registered users (VIPs) to help us with this enormous task, but nevertheless it is still a daunting operation.

So if we seem a bit wild-eyed and twitchy down our end of the 1st floor, please bear with us. There’s a lot to do in the coming weeks.

Correction: Actually we do still crack open beers from the fridge. It’s not that bad.

2 Comments

  1. Marty from new yawk,
    July 21st, 2008 at 12:25 pm:

    As a listener, I hereby volunteer to assist in the migration. Please email me what you’d like me to do.


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  2. llia,
    July 21st, 2008 at 1:32 pm:

    Marty my dear! You can help us out by going here and ‘playing’ Spot the Virgin: http://www.virginradio.co.uk/interact/spot_the_virgin/

    I would just like to point out that I wanted to call it “Help take our Virginity” but apparently that wasn’t really acceptable…

    Anyway, I’ve posted it here so that others can see and take part. It really is strangely addictive. And it really is helping us out. :)


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