Business Website
UKROC
UKROC is the UK Youth Rocketry Challenge: the national competition, organised by ADS, that has schoolchildren designing, building and launching rockets for a place at the International Final at Farnborough International Airshow. Twenty years in, it's bigger than ever, and we redeveloped the website that runs it.
About
A full redevelopment for a record-breaking competition
The UKROC website is the front door for everything: team registration, competition rules that change every year, nine regional events, and a steady stream of news as each season unfolds. We redeveloped the site in full, giving the ADS team a modern, easy-to-update platform that handles the annual rhythm of the competition, registration opening, regionals, finals, champions, without needing a developer every season.
The challenge
A website that resets every year
UKROC runs on an annual cycle: rules change, dates change, registration opens and closes, and a year’s worth of news accumulates before the whole thing begins again. The old site made that cycle harder work than it needed to be. The redevelopment had to give the team full control of every seasonal update, present the competition clearly to teachers, students and sponsors alike, and cope with the registration surges of a competition growing 40% year on year.
The solution
Rebuilt for the rhythm of competition
We redeveloped the site in full on a platform the ADS team manages themselves: competition information, registration windows, regional event details and news all updated in-house in minutes. The structure guides each audience to what they need, teachers to registration and rules, students to the challenge, sponsors to the impact story, while a news section documents each season’s record-breaking progress from first launch to international final.
The impact
Powering the competition's biggest years yet
The redeveloped site has carried UKROC through consecutive record seasons, with 2026 seeing more than 1,600 students from 234 schools register through the platform. The team runs each season without technical bottlenecks, and the competition’s story, from village playing fields to the Farnborough International Airshow, has a home that keeps pace with it.