Our design and development team embraced the challenge by first pulling content from the individual NYRA racetrack and event websites into one parent domain, NYRA.com. From there, we created a design system based on color coding – each racetrack or event has a unique color assigned to it – to help users navigate the full site and distinguish content unique to each sub-brand. (Aqueduct Racetrack = Teal, Belmont Park = Green, Saratoga Race Course = Red, Belmont Stakes = Gold). Because NYRA racetracks conduct racing year-round and never overlap one another, we designed the NYRA.com homepage to rotate, so content from the track currently operating is always displayed first.
User-friendly navigation can be a challenge for racing websites, given the amount of current and archival information they hold. To address this, our team greatly streamlined the NYRA.com menu system, organizing the most sought-after content into logical buckets for NYRA’s principal audiences (horsemen, handicappers, journalists, casual fans, and tourists) to explore.
The site’s design system includes illustrative iconography that also serves as a wayfinding tool, pointing users to race entries and changes, live race streams and results, and horsemen’s information. Page designs also provide shortcuts to breaking news stories, handicapping advice, and monthly calendar information for visitors planning trips to the track. Promotional content from the NYRA Bets online wagering platform infuses the site, inviting visitors to sign up and grow their relationship with the brand.
While NYRA.com’s reimagined front-end design and UX are transformative, improvements to the site’s backend are equally impressive. Like NYRA Bets, NYRA.com has been transitioned into a decoupled CMS powered by Django. Site managers easily create and modify content through an intuitive front-end editing interface, while API-supplied racing and wagering information feeds into the backend of the site through a custom-built data aggregator we call Track Radar.
This data – which arrives in the form of racing entries, race changes and scratches, horse pedigree information, real-time wagering odds and betting information, and live video feeds – is commingled and displayed through a custom-built dashboard offering site visitors everything they need to watch and wager on live horse racing virtually.
To ensure NYRA.com could handle significant traffic spikes on big race days, we overhauled its content delivery and hosting infrastructure, implementing a more robust and redundant solution. This upgrade included a scalable cloud architecture designed to handle high volumes of traffic, especially during events that drive peak visitation, such as the Belmont Stakes. Our team rigorously tests the system to guarantee its stability, ensuring NYRA.com remains fully operational during critical moments without any downtime or performance issues.