July 2010 Archives

Flightglobal prides itself on providing the most comprehensive aviation coverage in the world, and as another Farnborough Air Show becomes a distant memory, I hope you don't mind us sharing with you what the biggest air show of the year meant for us.

We are happy to report that the Farnborough Air Show was another roaring success, with
Flightglobal breaking through the two million page view barrier for the first time in a single week, with over half a million visits and over 330,000 unique visitors coming to Flightglobal during the week of the show. This is a rise of 53% versus the previous Farnborough in 2008 and 12% rise on Paris 2009.

After pioneering the integrated media coverage approach at last year's Paris Air Show a year ago, we once again opened our doors to interested visitors while producing an array of content live at the show for Flightglobal, Flight International magazine, Flight Daily News and our new interactive magazine iFlight.

Some of the other highlights included:

• Our brand new Farnborough design led show page had nearly 250,000 page views and nearly 150,000 visits
• The flying display live streaming (in association with FLIR systems) had 71,000 page views and 45,000 visits
• Our 3 issues of exclusive iFlight magazines have been opened over 14,000 times
• We produced over 400 Farnborough articles during the week which had nearly 350,000 page views on their own, over 35 videos produced at the show, 121 blog posts from our range of bloggers and countless tweets from our Twitterati.
  

Our content also went beyond the aviation market with two of our videos making the daily most viewed chart on YouTube, being one of the first to show the Boeing 787 arrive and also provide a unique infrared look at the F-22 flying display, being viewed over 43,000 and 51,000 respectively.

All we can say now is roll on Paris 2011!

Flightglobal launched its Farnborough 2010 show page - the "go-to" page for every aspect of coverage from the air show, showcasing everything Farnborough has to offer.

The page allows you to "experience Farnborough as never before" with live video streaming of each day's flying display, an interactive daily magazine, a heatmapped graphic of the static display leading you to profiles of each aircraft, plus all the news, video, images, blog posts, and you can also see what people are saying about #FARN10 on Twitter in real time. 

Our coverage promises to be the most comprehensive and innovative yet - giving those attending, and those not, a host of opportunities to connect with this year's biggest industry event.

Editor's Blog about the thinking behind our all-new show page design

One of my biggest gripes about the web is that all too often style gets sacrificed in favour of utility.

"Usability" and "Search Engine Optimisation" always seem to out muscle "coolness" and "panache" in the battle for on-page real estate.

With our Farnborough Air Show 2010 coverage, we're attempting to buck the trend.

Our Head of Design and Production, Alexis Rendell, came up with some awesome visuals trying to put magazine design standards onto our web pages, complete with a "front cover" style page given over completely to beautiful images from this year's biggest air show.

We've got nine pages lovingly (and painstakingly) crafted from 1s and 0s, showcasing everything Farnborough has to offer. The aim is to provide an online air show experience like never before:

Front Cover
News
Video
Blogs
Twitter
Images
iFlight
Static
Flying

I'll talk through a couple, but then leave you to explore the rest in your own time:

The Front Cover


As mentioned above, the design brief was to bring a magazine-esque front cover to the show pages. We've achieved this with a page dedicated to the best images each day at the show generates.

We're pouring over the 1000s of images that come into us each morning for the next fortnight, and cherry-picking six of very best, most impactful shots to front the show each day.

It's an indulgent use of a webpage, but we were so wowed by the original designs that we had to make it happen.

News


On the news page we've reverted to a stylish black background with white text. Fans of Tweetdeck will get our reference point for that.

Listening to feedback, we've included sector-specific news headlines on the news page this year - Air Transport, Biz Av, Defence and Aerospace.

We also know that you love your pictures so there's a thumbnail with each lead story to liven up the page.

iFlight


This is a much-improved way to showcase our deliciously cool iFlight Interactive Magazine.

If you've not seen an issue yet, then make sure you get on the end of the first Farnborough issue (19th July). They really are a bridge between magazine and website, brimming with images, videos, interviews and interactive graphics.

This page currently shows some greyed-out front covers, but those will be replaced with the actually front covers as we publish them. However you can get an idea of what's coming from the teaser text. If you want an email reminder you can sign up here ...

The other pages are equally glorious but best experienced first hand.

Like many aerospace companies, we like to use the major air shows as a launch page for new products and services.

These pages will form a template for future show coverage on Flightglobal, but we welcome any feedback below if you'd like to see any changes implemented.