Picture this: It’s your biggest event of the year, one you and your team have been working on for several months. You’re expecting 100,000 customers to visit your venue over a five-day period, and millions more to visit your event website during the festivities.
As the event climax draws near, an uninvited guest turns your well-laid plans upside down, leaving you and your team scrambling to revisit timelines, reschedule activities, and rewrite the story you told your attendees about the exceptional days they would have on your turf.
When Event Planning Meets the Unexpected
This is the scenario our client-partners at the New York Racing Association (NYRA) faced during the 157th Belmont Stakes, NYRA’s biggest day of horse racing and the final leg of the prestigious Triple Crown. For a second year, NYRA conducted its signature event at historic Saratoga Race Course in upstate New York, while the reconstruction of its home facility, Belmont Park, continues on Long Island.
Earlier this year, NYRA unveiled its reimagined website, including a refreshed Belmont Stakes special event section. Our Culture Foundry crew helped plan, design, and develop the new site with the stated goal of enhancing the front-end user experience, while creating a custom-built, back-end data aggregator to compile, process, and present real-time racing information supplied by multiple sources.
Building a High-Performance Digital Experience for the Belmont Stakes
As was the case with our decades-long work on the Kentucky Derby website, our goal with the updated NYRA.com was threefold:
- Create a show-stopping special event website that draws fans around the world into horse racing’s biggest days, translating in-person experiences into meaningful virtual touchpoints.
- Integrate complex industry data streams into user-friendly educational tools and informational dashboards fans can utilize to understand the sport, handicap outcomes, and place wagers.
- Elevate a traditional ecommerce portal into a critical brand extension through which fans can purchase tickets, buy merchandise, plan visits, demonstrate loyalty, and prepare themselves for the traditions and pageantry tied to horse racing’s most popular events.
Key Features of NYRA’s New Belmont Stakes Event Site
The annual Belmont Festival of Racing (June 4-8, 2025) provided the first big test of NYRA.com’s new Belmont Stakes section, and the early results are positive:
- With the help of planned web server autoscaling, the site remained performant and stable during the surges in web traffic that occur during FOX Sports’ coverage of the pre-race festivities and the big spike that comes during and immediately after the race itself, as fans around the world check online results and replays.
- Fans raved about new content areas, including
- The Official Belmont Stakes Visitor Guide, a colorful composite of Racing Festival events happening throughout the week, condensed into a handy calendar format, including venue maps, gate open times, parking advice, and transportation tips.
- The new Belmont Stakes Contenders page, a snazzy baseball card-styled snapshot of the eight powerhouse ponies entered in the $2 million race and their connections, silks colors, and live odds.
- The Belmont Stakes Experts Picks page, a simplified summary of race analysis and wagering plays pulled into a day-by-day, race-by-race format for handicappers looking for an edge.
- The Belmont Stakes Racing Guide, a horseplayer’s one-stop-shop for Racing Festival information, including stakes schedules, post times, wagering menus, betting tips, and how and where to watch the races in person, online, and on television.
- Additionally, fans could locate Racing Festival information in two areas of NYRA.com, the Belmont Stakes and Saratoga Race Course sections, to help newcomers find the information they needed regardless of how they initiated their online search or navigated the NYRA family of websites.
In short, everything online was running at a gallop as the biggest day of the Racing Festival approached, Belmont Stakes Day on Saturday, June 7. As it turns out, a friction-free online experience was essential to managing and mitigating the impacts of what Mother Nature had in store.
Handling the Unexpected: Real-Time Updates for Race Day Changes
Heavy rain, which started on Friday, June 6, continued through the morning and early afternoon hours of Belmont Stakes Day. Steady precipitation caused muddy track conditions and forced four undercard races off the turf and onto the dirt track. What’s more, two high-profile turf races, the Grade I Jaipur and Manhattan Stakes, were postponed until Sunday, June 8, so the grass specialists entered in each contest had a better shot of competing at their best on their preferred surface.
All of these weather-related changes had to be communicated to spectators at the track and fans around the world, particularly those planning to wager on the affected races. Our four-person NYRA support crew (Colin Williams, Forrest Moulton, Neel Patel, and yours truly, Trevor Dodd) leapt into the saddle, making real-time corrections to racing entries and race day schedules, while monitoring the multiple data inputs and outputs that comprise NYRA.com’s technical back end to ensure all changes were synced and displaying accurately.
In some instances, modifications to Racing Festival-related content had to wait until off hours to ensure no site disruptions for web visitors. That meant our crew started at daybreak and burned the midnight oil throughout the week and weekend, providing the technical and editorial support NYRA’s marketing, communications, and racing operations teams needed so they could focus on other priorities and tend to their guests.
Why 24/7 Website Support Matters for Major Events
That kind of 24/7 website monitoring and support is built into Culture Foundry’s working relationship with organizations like NYRA, and it’s the differentiator we bring to all of our sports and entertainment clients. When you hire our crew to plan, design, build, and maintain your special event website, you can count on the following:
- Elevated Digital Experiences: We make the digital experience for remote fans as immersive and special as attending the event in person, capturing and virtually communicating the sights, sounds, and spectacle of the event.
- Website Stability and Performance: We ensure special event websites are stable, fast, and capable of handling millions of visitors, especially during peak traffic times. Plus, we actively monitor site analytics and infrastructure to guarantee optimal performance.
- Live Data Integration: We integrate live data sources, allowing websites to display real-time information such as live odds, race entries, results, photo finishes, and video replays.
- Content Management and Delivery: We update websites with a wide array of content, including media releases, photo galleries, race results, video replays, blog posts, and sponsor promotions, and we collaborate with event photographers, broadcasters (NBC, ESPN, FOX Sports), and internal editorial teams to generate and post fresh content and “breaking news” throughout event week.
- Expertise in Digital Experience: As a digital experience agency, we offer expertise and insight across all layers necessary to create an exceptional digital experience for websites and applications. We help our sports and entertainment clients reclaim the power of digital and transform their websites into important brand extensions.
Culture Foundry Winning Formula for Digital Event Success
Culture Foundry offers best-in-class web strategy, design, UX, and development experience prior to site launch and comprehensive support after it to ensure special event websites are dynamic, high-performing platforms with global reach. If you need an event site that is truly special, we’d love to give you a leg up and take you to the Winner’s Circle.
Experience the Results: Watch, Learn, Get Inspired
If you missed this year’s race, watch the 157th Belmont Stakes, review the official results, and catch up on the latest live racing from Belmont’s 2025 Spring Meet at Aqueduct Racetrack.
Learn how our crew supports major sports and entertainment events and their websites by checking out our adventures during the Greatest Two Minutes in Sports:
- Take Your Website to the Winner’s Circle
- Long Shot
- The Greatest Two Minutes in Sports
- Behind the Scenes at the Kentucky Derby
- A Day At the Derby
