Racecourse Holdings Trust

We built a bespoke content management system, e-commerce functionality and provided technical build for 14 websites.

The Racecourse Holdings Trust (RHT) owns some of Europe’s most popular racecourses, including Cheltenham, Aintree, Epsom and Sandown, and stage televised events with millions of followers, such as the Cheltenham festival and the Grand National.

Governor Technology provided the technical foundation for the RHT’s first online presence, with responsibility for build, launch and maintenance of 12 editable sites, with facilities for gathering user registrations, collecting questionnaires and running competitions online. We were hired again in 2003/4 as part of a major project to enhance the functionality of all the RHT’s sites, in the areas of content management, E-Commerce and online marketing.

Each of the new RHT sites are fully content managed, enabling non-technical staff at each racecourse to update news, details of events and even to build new pages and navigation via a simple WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface. The system also imports feeds of fixtures and results from courses and external partners, updating both the fixtures pages and the events available for purchase in the ticketing area.

Governor Technology built a bespoke ticketing and merchandising application for site users to purchase everything they need online, which was securely integrated with both the RHT’s offline ticket management database, and all the major payment gateways. 

All these applications were developed in JSP and Java servlets with a Java middle tier, and run on IIS with JRun server. Since launch, Governor Technology is responsible for technical maintenance and hosting for all sites, which can experience peak loads of several million hits/day. We also designed and manage a solution for delivery of the RHT’s direct marketing emails to customers and registered users, and are currently adding a series of accessibility enhancements to the sites.

www.rht.net