Horse Sport Ireland

The main aim was a design overhaul. We wanted a bright clean design to showcase the organisations brand and professionalism.

Another objective was to understand the external event data and the process our client’s employees used to gather and use the event data.

Other objectives were: redesigning site structure and hierarchy, connecting with social media, integrating with Irish Horse TV, implementing a new form system.

As the equine authority in Ireland, HSI have many official procedural and registration documents that the community needed to use.  Feedback confirmed that the community found it hard to locate these documents.

Integration with the client’s other website Irish Horse Gateway where horses are bought and sold.

Delivering a new bespoke responsive theme was the easy part.

We also engaged with the Horse Sport Ireland employees to understand how they gathered the external data which came from the FEI.org website.

Automating the data collection would save hundreds of employee hours every month which meant talking to the developers at FEI.

We addressed the problem of difficult to find documents by simplifying and restructuring the content hierarchy and providing a good search system.

A bespoke Genesis child theme was created using a minimal amount of jQuery to keep loading times down.  We increased font size and spacing to make content more readable and put in Ubermenu for a flexible navigation system.

We used the FEI’s API to access their database and wrote several plugins to download the Irish data every night and process the results, filtering data in to a series of hierarchical custom post types.  The data was then incorporated into the theme and exposed to the community along with an advanced filtering system allowing deeper data to be found.

Irish Horse TV built us some custom players so we could embed their content in several different locations across the theme.