balloonrace.com relaunch

The relaunch is getting closer. I’ve been given the go ahead from my solicitor to add a FREE entry by post button – this changes the software from a lottery to a Free Prize Draw. The free entry button will be compulsory on all races.

Entries via the free postal option will need a cut off date that’s 2 days later than the paid entry to allow for postal delivery.

When advertising your balloon race you must state that free entry is available and it must be clear and easy to find. When you receive your free postal entries you can simply add them in the admin area. All free entries have the same chance of winning as paid entrants.

Even though the site has been inactive for 4 weeks the traffic has continued to grow exponentially and on 18/10/2020 it finally colapsed with more than 200,000 page views. So we’ve used the downtime to help with scalability going forward. The backend database was 11 years old so that’s been renewed and moved to a faster server.

We’re now aiming to relaunch at the beginning of November.

Other good news is that we’ve added coffee shop balloons: