Most web designers know that if there are a few teething troubles when they launch a new site, it won't be the end of the world - or even their business. Niggling problems can be ironed out in the first few days and, with a bit of luck, most customers will never know anything was amiss.
Martin Gill doesn't have that luxury. As one of a team of designers behind the Comic Relief Red Nose Day website, he has only one chance to get it right. If the site goes down - even for an hour - the charity could lose millions of pounds in donations.
For the first time this year, Comic Relief has set up a separate website for Red Nose Day. It went live on February 7 and will focus on the events leading up to and around March 14, providing extra footage not seen on television, as well as education packs, competitions and fundraising ideas. More importantly, it will be the focus for online donations.
With a television audience of 10 million, many of whom will choose to donate via the internet in the 48 hours around the programme, the site cannot afford to crash.
Comic Relief has been taking online donations since 1997 when, privately, it was stunned to raise £40,000 this way. Two years later, this rose to £400,000, showing the public was becoming more comfortable with the internet. In 2001, they surpassed all expectations when 84,000 hits raised £3.5m - 6% of the £55m total.
While they were prepared for a substantial increase two years ago, Gill admits that the site nearly crashed a couple of times. "It was close to the wire at certain points," he says. "We had allowed for a tenfold increase on 1999 and we were pretty bang on with that."
But there are many more factors to take into consideration this year. "We don't know what effect the recession will have on donations, or the fact that we might be at war by March 14. We do know that there has not been a significant increase in the number of people with web access, compared with the rise between 1999 and 2001, but we don't know whether that will make a difference to the level of online donations."
So they started by assuming another tenfold increase in the number of hits, and have built a site to cope with that level of demand. They teamed up with some of the leading companies in new technology, including Cisco Systems, Energis, Hitachi Data Systems, Macromedia, Oracle, Retail Logic, Sun Microsystems and Zeus Technology.
The resulting site, rednoseday.com, is one of the most sophisticated systems for online donation that has ever been set up. The designers, who have all given their talents for free, are confident that it will provide a model for the future.
"The key thing is that it has to cope with huge variations in traffic," says Gill. "People will be responding to the television and if Lenny Henry suddenly shouts: 'Everybody, get online now and give us your money,' then the site has to be able to cope with 10 million viewers logging on at the same time."
To cope with these user spikes, the site will be run by a sophisticated and state-of-the-art system of servers which are designed to balance the load evenly between them. Should one crash, another will automatically take over. There is even a third set of servers in a separate building eight kilometres away from the first.
"The separate building is just extra back-up if there are big spikes - it means we can run things more smoothly without sweating, but it can also take over if a major disaster strikes the main system," says Gill. "We have generators and back-up systems but if the building were to explode then we could transfer the technicians to the other place and keep taking the donations."
Amanda Horton-Mastin, marketing director of Comic Relief and the project manager for new media, says the site will also be an interesting way of observing people's attitude to the internet. By including lots of unseen footage from behind the scenes, as well as stuff that didn't make the final edit, Horton-Mastin is hopeful that people will be so familiar with the site by March 14 that they will have it bookmarked. Unseen highlights of Celebrity Driving School are one such treat for those who can't get enough of Gareth Gates, Paul O'Grady and Jade Goody. The BBC's Fame Academy is also up for the celebrity treatment, and discussions are still continuing about whether there will be 24-hour live streaming and online voting.
"New media is now a fundamental instrument for fundraising and one that Comic Relief intends to fully embrace," says Horton-Mastin. "We want to be at the forefront of that new technology and take advantage of it."
She also points out that online donations are "hyper-efficient". Any money given on the internet is instantly authorised and processed to the Comic Relief coffers.
By the following day, the money will already be in the charity's bank accounts. Telephone donations, by contrast, have to be individually transcribed and processed and can take months to arrive at their final destination, giving many donors who pledged £100 in a fit of excitement a nasty shock when it finally disappears from their current accounts three months later.
Over-the-counter donations at the bank still make up the most significant part of the total, with around 22% raised this way through the sponsored events that take place up and down the country. Much of this money won't come in to Comic Relief until weeks after the event.
"We know from last year that there was a huge spike in traffic when the news came on," says Horton-Mastin, "so it has to be really resilient and also work quickly so that people don't get bored waiting for it to load."
The website will be capable of taking 200 transactions a second - roughly what a major bank would process in the last hours of Christmas Eve when shoppers hit panic mode. The Comic Relief team isn't taking any chances with extracting the nation's money.
