Punchestown Racecourse

There's no racing experience greater than that to be had at Punchestown Racecourse. It is known world-wide for its exciting racing, leading hospitality and general great days out.

With a history steeped in tradition and a focus on the future, Punchestown engaged Kaizen to revitalise their digital offering, to provide current and future visitors with an appealing, easy to use website.

The website must be robust to handle huge volumes of visitors at peak times of the year and must provide opportunity for the communications and marketing teams to deliver a digital strategy that would reach a global audience.

Data, Analytics and User Testing

When approaching a project like this, we start with data and analytics. Understanding who our visitors are, where they come from and what they do on our site is paramount.

Before, considering design a determined focus on understand. We use a variety of analysis tools to truly understand website interaction and use this to make informed decisions within the design process.

Wireframes

Following a robust process and period of understanding, we use the data, knowledge and experience to create flat wireframes. This allows us to model each page and section within a web page to ensure we present the correct level of content, imagery and opportunity for customer to engage in the manner as expected.

Website Design

On approval of the wireframes our website design team took the existing brand guidelines and assets to create an on brand website design. We worked closely with 3rd party content writers and the Communications and Marketing Manager to ensure all business needs that were identified were addressed at this stage of the design.

Website Development

Once the flat designs were reviewed and signed off, we moved into the development process on the Punchestown website. At this point we also worked closely on the technical integration with our 3rd party ticketing vendors. We had previously confirmed that their mechanism for sale of tickets online integrated with our own systems through an API call. We set up a sandbox for testing this in development as ticket sales where a primary focus of this site.

The current iteration of the Punchestown Racecourse is now a few years in existence and has successfully guided hundreds of thousands of visitors to Punchestown race meetings.

It is engaging and an effective tool for the marketing and sales functions to use as part of their own strategic plans. Due to the nature of the business, the website (like all should) is continuously evolving to meet the growing needs of the organisation.

We have further supported Punchestown with a cohesive digital marketing strategy since 2017, helping them to create campaigns and activities that further promote the racecourse, its festival and other events held at the location.