Red Cross launches centenary site thanks to public cloud partner

The Australian Red Cross celebrated its 100th birthday last week with the launch of a centenary website created by Link Digital, powered by AWS infrastructure.

The centenary site has heavy data requirements, with the collection and telling of multimedia "crowd-sourced" stories a major component of the commemoration. The site also brings together archival material from institutional sources like the Australian National Library.

Text, photos, audio and video are all harvested and published on the site.

"My message to the channel is: With AWS, you will see more of this type of work - small agencies taking on big projects," said Steven de Costa, executive director for Link Digital.

"Before AWS came along, digital companies were encumbered to hosting companies." de Costa told CRN. "Now AWS allows the small agencies to scale. Customers as big as the Red Cross will not be afraid to take on smaller providers."

Creating a "data first website" meant that scalability was important, with the challenge that neither the customer nor the digital agency truly knew how much capacity and bandwidth the end product required.

"The Red Cross wanted it to perform well, but they weren’t sure how popular it would be or how much content there would be," de Costa said. "So it was a natural fit for AWS. It allows us to scale horizontally or vertically."

"While customer may come to us with UX requirements, it's our job to have all the bases covered technically."

According to Link Digital, the Australian Red Cross centenary website has now had "32,000 site visits, more than 150,000 page views and has gathered over 600 personal stories".

Link Digital has 16 staff and de Costa told CRN that everyone had contributed to the Red Cross project one way or another since the kick off in May last year.

While he established the Canberra-based company back in 2001, the last two years has seen the firm re-focus on being a "full stack" digital agency dealing with open data catalogues.

"We have knowledge that only comes from 13 years of experience. We treat the data layer as the first priority," said de Costa.

Humanitarian organisation Australian Red Cross was born in Melbourne as a local branch of the British Red Cross on 13 August 1914, nine days after the start of World War I.