Engage Interactive Blog

Back in December 2007 we started work on the re-development of Sky’s ‘At The Races’ website which as the name suggests is for people who like to spend time, well, at the races …

The previous site had been there for a few years, which in internet years makes it about 80, so unsurprisingly it was a little out of fashion and struggling to go to the toilet on it’s own. Our task was to give it a new lease of life, completely refreshing the look and bringing it in line with the Channel’s new branding. As well as being able to accommodate an awful lot of content, the design also had numerous commercial requirements with the inclusion of high visibility banner ads and MPU’s – all of which made the planning and approach quite unique.

“We chose to work with Engage as their experience with sports and blue-chip sites speaks for itself. We’re delighted with how the relationship has developed; their ability to understand our requirements has been key to meeting some incredibly tight deadlines and the proactive approach Dave and Alex take has helped us exceed our initial ambitions.”

Matthew Taylor | Head of Online

The project itself was a combination of 3 parties, us – obviously, the guys at At The Races and then the development team at Sky who would have the (unenviable) task of plugging in all the functionality once we’d completed the build. With so many people on a single project it was essential to keep track of all communications, make sure everyone was aware of current progress at any time in the project and also create milestones (over 100 as it turned out) to make sure we were going to hit the March 1st deadline. To achieve this, we managed the whole project via our web-based project management software – which proved painless and effective.

Designing and building a site of this size in what was an extremely tight 3 month timeframe was always going to be a challenge but we’re extremely happy (and also quite proud) that we managed it pretty much unscathed, and even found time to squeeze in a couple of other launches in the process.

You can view the site at www.attheraces.com – why not have a flutter?