Racing WA Transforms the User Experience Consolidating 12 Websites into Two, Leveraging Progress Sitefinity Cloud and Next.js

With 12 different WordPress websites and two standalone Next.js applications, Racing WA was looking to consolidate their web properties into a unified and engaging experience for its diverse user base. Their audiences sought a holistic view of racing information, news, events and content relating to the wider racing industry in Western Australia, all from a single location. Racing WA realized it needed a single, unified platform to deliver the superior digital experiences its users expected – and that was not something their existing CMS infrastructure could offer.

“We've got multiple platforms and multiple pieces of content sitting in different areas that are not particularly well documented,” explained Richard Quance, Head of Content for Racing WA. “The core at creating engagement in racing is the information that can be provided in advance of a race. That includes who's running in the race, jockey information, horse information, trainer information, the type of conditions that the race might be running. And once the race has been run, making the historical data of that race available as well. Our goal was to connect our vast racing content with our extensive race data in a more meaningful way.”

From a technological standpoint, Racing WA sought to streamline their technology stack across the organization, with a focus on expanding the adoption of Next.js, a framework they embraced over ten years ago but had not yet extended to their content websites.

Racing WA conducted an extensive due diligence process to identify the best CMS for its requirements. The incumbent WordPress was re-evaluated, and Sitefinity, Sitecore, Kentico and Squiz were also included in the process. In the end, Sitefinity was chosen for a variety of attributes, including its ease of use and extendibility. Also important to Racing WA was Sitefinity’s ease of integration with numerous external data sources including critical racing data, a favorable licensing fee structure and being a mature product with widespread industry adoption.

From an implementation standpoint, Racing WA utilized the hybrid/headless architecture of Progress^® Sitefinity^® Cloud with the REST API layer powering the new Next.js Sitefinity renderer and the Chakra UI component library to build widgets. Compared to the traditional headless solution without page-building capabilities, Sitefinity gave Racing WA a full drag-and-drop/point-and-click WYSIWYG experience for business users. Through this architecture, frontend widget development, content development/migration and page assembly took place in parallel, resulting in a streamlined total time to market of eight months. Developers focused on development and marketers focused on content without depending on each other. Once widgets were ready, marketers could create pages.

“We found that we were able to empower and shift a lot more responsibility and ownership to the frontend team and then scale that out,” said Ross Whisson, Technical Project Lead for Racing WA, The Brand Agency. “That's obviously one of the reasons why we were able to deliver components much quicker. The time taken to build a component was reduced by 30-50% compared to before, due to the rapid development practices and not needing to use both frontend and backend resources, plus compiling the solution for each component.”

“And we're building new features on it relatively quickly as well, so integrating new rendering components in Next.js is proving to be a really powerful framework for building modern web apps,” he continued. 

To create a seamless, integrated customer experience, implementation partner The Brand Agency designed a unified information architecture relying on shared taxonomies between Sitefinity and Racing WA’s race data application. Taxonomies facilitate proper content organization, which in turn supports contextual links between different content pieces, coherent presentation of related content and facilitates thematic cross-references between the content-rich website and the race data application. The result is faster, more accurate searches for Racing WA’s user base.