Eventing Ireland
The brief for EventingIreland.com was not only to create a conventional website for promoting the governing body of this popular equine sport but to provide a complete administrative centre encompassing member and horse registrations, competition management, fee payment processing, result archiving and more. The challenges we faced in this project were…
Legacy Data
The new web based admin centre for Eventing Ireland would have to incorporate data from two completely different databases from two different branches of the organisation. These databases contained broadly the same type of information, such as member and horse information as well as previous competition results, but stored that information in entirely different ways. As the data, which dated back as far as 1995, was never intended for use in a web application neither database stored its information in the kind of precise way needed for this use. Where most companies would have simply refused to use this legacy data we rose to the challenge. With the help of Eventing Ireland officials we developed a series of programs to begin compiling, filtering and repairing the data from the two disparate sources and over a period of six weeks approximately 50,000 individual records were drawn into one central database.
Member and Horse Management
Once the legacy data was imported Eventing Ireland needed a means of administering that data and adding new records. We created a full administrative system that allows the organisation complete control over member and horse records in one place. The system also allows members to view and update their own information as well as register horses. They can even pay their membership and horse registration fees online using the site's secure payment facility.
Competition Management
The primary purpose of Eventing Ireland is the organisation of eventing competitions throughout Ireland. The sport consists of three equine disciplines - dressage, showjumping and cross country. The system needed to allow officials to create competitions and then manage every aspect of them as well as automate processes wherever possible to make administration as simple as possible. Tasks that may have taken hours previously can now be carried out in seconds, even down to the allocation of time slots for competitors. Eventing Ireland members can now enter competitions and pay entry fees online rather than having to send in applications by post. As well as the online administration of events we also created an innovative offline method for scoring in-the-field…
The Scoring System
A major aspect of this project was the need for an offline scoring system that officials could bring to events and record and process scores then upload them directly to the main website for viewing by the public. Working closely with experienced scorers we developed an application that could handle the complex scoring methods used in dressage, showjumping and cross country then combine them to give overall eventing scores. The application needed to be able to cope with many factors such as penalties, eliminations, non-placing entries (known as HC results). At the end of the competition the results can then be uploaded directly to the Eventing Ireland website to be processed and presented to the public.
The Benefits
In the first few weeks of being online Eventing Ireland have seen many benefits from the website. Early indications show that memberships, horse registrations and competition entries have increased dramatically in comparison to the same period last year. The administrative burden has also been significantly reduced. Public feedback and site statistics show the ability to search and browse thousands of competition results and horse and rider records is very popular with site visitors. The site's 'sticky' properties are excellent with a very high page view to visitor ratio and its Google rankings are also very high. This proves there is no substitute for high quality relevant site content.
This project was co-ordinated by Karen Gray and addtional assistance was provided by Jenny Doran, David Lowry and Kathryn Fell.
