Horse of the year show is the number one show of the equestrian calendar and is the culmination of the British showing season. The show welcomes 1,600 horses and ponies, 1,500 competitors and 60,000 visitors to the NEC each year.
Lead time:
8 weeks
Target type:
B2B / B2C
Sector:
Services:
CMS:
Custom Website / WordPress
Objectives:
The HOYS website is the hub for the show’s visitors, competitors, and service providers. It offers visitor information, show timetables, hospitality ticket sales, hotel booking, trade information, links to important competitor resources and much more.
This project’s primary focus was to provide a bespoke, robust, and reliable ticket sales platform, as well as overhauling the HOYS website. The project was split into three broad objectives: website rebuild, bespoke ticket commerce web application and hosting infrastructure.
Solutions:
With as many as 40,000 website sessions per day during the show’s peak and with very specific requirements, a bespoke ticket commerce system integrating with the newly designed and built WordPress website was the best solution.
This allowed us to work with Grandstand Media to build a product which an off the shelf solution would just not provide. It also allowed us to keep the application bloat free and lightning fast, even during the very highest periods of demand.
Approach:
We built the website itself in WordPress, a widely used and accessible CMS. This was the key in maintaining the agility that Grandstand Media needed enabling them to update the content themselves on their website with support from Weaving Webs.
We then integrated the bespoke ticket commerce system directly with WordPress with a custom plugin, offering a seamless experience for their customers while providing a commerce platform that can run separately from WordPress. This method ensured reliable performance and blazing speeds for this critical piece of infrastructure.
What we did:
A bespoke ticket sales platform
The client needed a solution to sell tickets directly from their website with very specific requirements that off the shelf solutions could not provide. We worked closely with the client to take their requirements, build upon them, and develop them into a working solution.
We designed and built a web portal written in React that interfaces to a GraphQL API written in Go. With the flexibilty of this architecture we were able to build a solution that exactly fit the clients needs. All of this while keeping the application light, fast and secure.
Website Design and Build
We worked with the client to completely redesign and build their website with updated visuals, reasearched and considered user journeys and added new user features.
Managed Hosting
One of the most important aspects of this project was providing the underlying infrastructure for all these new systems. Performance, reliability, and security were all top priority, and our managed hosting service gives our client the piece of mind that their new sales platform will operate even with huge peaks in demand.
