Stampede Design
There are so many people with different quirks passing by while I’m enjoying my Espresso Ice-Blended under the Starbucks green canopy. I’m here surfing the web while waiting for the wind. The very first race of Royal Langkawi International Regatta 2010 should have started this morning. But the wind is envious of us. No wind, no sail.
Yacht racing in regatta 2010
So here I am in Langkawi to cover this event, my first on-site gig since I joined Stampede in May 2009. The Royal Langkawi Yacht Club has been working with Stampede since 2004. Besides design and development for their web presence, we also provide maintenance to their websites all year round. But it all builds up to this 6-day event.
It is exciting to meet our good client and participants to this yacht race. Renee Chung, who is currently responsible for maintaining the yacht club’s website is going to hand over everything to me this April.
The Regatta is an annual, prestigious yacht race with entrants from all over the world. There are 8 different categories: Racing, IRC, Sports, Sports under 25, Multihull, Club Cruising and Ocean Rovers. We have our own Malaysian favorite, the Navy with their racing yacht “Zuhal”. See them all in action in the Regatta photo gallery.
I am stationed at the yacht club itself, in the Regatta’s office. There is a constant blur of yacht owners and volunteers going in and out of the office. Most volunteers are expatriates who live in their boats anchored at the club – some were editing photos of the day, others are preparing newsletters for distribution and those idle ones managed to sneak some time playing games on their laptop. Zack, the Club’s manager, is busy collecting race results while drinking blue can of Revive.
Once the results are all in, Zack will hand them over to me for immediate online updating. The Regatta website is unique because real-time results need to be fed from another system into the website. All kind of media and press from all over the world will refer to the official result that we released. It is very crucial for it to be done accurately and on time. The website maintenance itself doesn’t seem too stressful because it was built on Joomla. Occasionally, new designs are introduced to some part of the website based on client’s request and it is also my responsibility to transfer this design into XHTML and CSS templates that will later be read by Joomla.
During the event itself, my task is to wrap up the day’s race. When the result is confirmed, the newsletter prepared and photos edited, they will all be handed over to me and I will update the website accordingly. There’s so much to do, but there’s award ceremony and partying every night at different locations too!
But until the wind comes, I am happy sitting here, enjoying this cold drink with white sails over blue blue sea in front of me.
(photo courtesy of The Royal Langkawi International Regatta)
