The Student Radio Awards 2005

One of my extra-curricular roles at the moment is my position as Chair of the Student Radio Association, which I was elected into in April. Amongst other things, the SRA runs the annual Student Radio Awards, which has now been running for 10 years, supported by BBC Radio One.

Over the last few months, I've been working hard behind the scenes to organise the judging of the record number of entries (almost 400) which arrived by the sackful days before the deadline on July 22nd. To pick out the six entries per category that would get nominated, over 40 judges working in the radio industry were enlisted to listen through the entries, giving feedback and their response (which is passed on entrants later on).

So after all this judging, the nominations were finally announced at regional nomination parties on Saturday. I was a bit paranoid about the nomination list somehow 'leaking' out before the designated time of 8PM, but it was held onto securely by the regional organisers. At the London party that I went to, XFM's Marsha and DJ Val Mellon read out the nominations.

When I got home, I sent the new awards 2005 website live. It was designed by Rik Ward, with me project managing and doing some of the implementation work. Once again, I opted for using Movable Type as a basic CMS (having done the same for Rare FM). Hacking this weblog-publishing tool into a general site-publishing tool is remarkably straight-forward, and it can do most of the things you want, simply. I made sure that the site uses permanent, clean URLs, to future-proof it against redesigns, and it even has an RSS feed for the news items and is valid XHTML strict.

More content will appear on the site over the coming weeks, including a complete archive of all the award's previous winners.

Tickets for the awards ceremony went on sale yesterday evening.