Q&A with Connie Bristow-Stagg, Product Owner, Racing WA, on consolidating 12 websites, improving searches and reducing time and cost to build web apps with Progress.
First of all, can you share a bit more about Racing WA and your role?
CB-S: Racing WA is the principal Racing Authority and State-appointed regulator of thoroughbred, harness and greyhound racing in Western Australia. We oversee the governance, integrity and welfare standards of the racing industry in the State and maintain a vibrant and diverse community around our passion for racing and care for animals.
I have been with Racing WA for just over a year. As Product Owner, my role is to define and drive the digital product vision in line with the company strategy.
How did the project to merge your 12 websites together into one powerful experience and deepen content integration capabilities come about?
CB-S: Before working with Progress, we were operating 12 different websites, along with two standalone applications. This created a disjointed user experience, led to high maintenance costs and resulted in an outdated, fragmented CMS infrastructure that couldn’t meet the modern standards of a superior digital experience for our community.
Creating engagement in racing starts with the information we provide before a race, both for industry professionals, punters and racing enthusiasts. This includes details on the competitors – such as the jockey, driver, horse and trainer – along with race day conditions and a comparison of previous performances. After the race, it’s equally important to make the historical data easily accessible. We identified inefficiencies in our content management processes and aimed to enhance our content integration capabilities.
The last piece of the puzzle was to expand our use of Next.js, a framework we had adopted a decade prior, but which had not been fully integrated into our content websites in a way that allows us to benefit from its full potential.
Looking at bringing everything into one digital experience, what were the major challenges you had to address?
CB-S: One of the key challenges was integrating Racing WA’s existing race data application with the new website while ensuring a smooth, seamless and user-friendly experience for visitors. We wanted to ensure that our new website maintained strong search functionality, dynamic content updates and effective content tagging – while also supporting future scalability.
Given the scale and complexity of the data involved, the challenge was to ensure the website could efficiently handle, process and present data in an accessible and appealing way.
Additionally, the project involved using a headless Next.js architecture, which is modern but requires a high level of expertise. We were careful not to disrupt the content editor experience in the backend by introducing technical barriers, which is a common challenge with developer-driven headless approaches. Our goal was to maintain a seamless experience for content editors while implementing the technical improvements.
Tell us more about your work with Progress: was this the first project with them or were they already part of your technology stack?
CB-S: We conducted an extensive due diligence process to identify the best CMS technology for our needs. We re-evaluated (existing tech) but also looked at Progress Sitefinity and solutions from Sitecore, Kentico and Squiz.
We chose Sitefinity for a variety of reasons, including its ease of use, easy onboarding and extensibility. What also stood out was Sitefinity’s ease of integration with third-party data sources, including our business-critical racing data, a favorable licensing structure and being a mature product with widespread industry adoption.
Finally, Sitefinity provided extensive Next.js support and capabilities allowing us to fully leverage the potential of this technology. We saw it as an exciting opportunity to unlock new possibilities for our platform.
Talk us through the project itself.
CB-S: Working with Progress’ local partner, The Brand Agency (an Ogilvy company), we implemented a headless cloud architecture powered by a REST API layer and Next.js. From a front-end development perspective, we used the Chakra UI component library. This setup allowed for a highly flexible and scalable digital platform.
Thanks to Sitefinity’s drag-and-drop interface, developers and marketers could work simultaneously – developers focused on widget development, customisation and back-end integrations, while marketers created pages without dependencies on developers. This significantly reduced development time and prevented disruptions in our operations and public facing facilities.
The Brand Agency designed a unified information architecture, using shared taxonomies to structure content efficiently. This enabled better search functionality and improved contextual links between content and race data.
The project was completed in eight months, with a 30-50 per cent reduction in time required to develop individual components due to the optimized development workflows and the use of Sitefinity Next.js.
The Brand Agency’s technology team brought deep expertise and an innovative approach that hugely contributed to the project outcomes. They worked closely with Progress’ product engineering team, which played a crucial role in ensuring that the new platform was optimized for high performance.
What benefits / outcomes came out of this project?
CB-S: By consolidating all racing-related content into one cohesive platform, we have been able to significantly enhance the user experience. It is now easier for Racing WA’s visitors to find news, industry resources, ownership details and animal welfare information in one place.
The integration of race data with editorial content creates a more dynamic and engaging website, offering users a richer, data-driven experience.
Looking at our operations internally, the fact that we’ve reduced by 30-50% the time required to build components means we can now develop and roll out features more quickly, as well as scale at a faster pace. Furthermore, our ability to create and manage pages without dependencies on technical resources reduced our ongoing costs.
The wider adoption of Next.js technology positions Racing WA as a pioneer in web development, showcasing our commitment to innovation. The successful execution of this project has not only streamlined content management, but it has also set a new industry standard for racing organisations looking to modernise their digital presence.
Looking at the future, are you planning any other major developments around your website and/or to help improve customer experience overall?
CB-S: Individualized customer experiences are what ultimately keep people engaged and coming back to the site. We plan to leverage Sitefinity’s AI-powered personalization capabilities to deliver tailored user experiences, keeping visitors engaged and driving more interest in the racing industry.
John Yang, VP, Progress APJ: Progress’ collaboration with The Brand Agency on Racing WA was a very important project because they were the first organisation worldwide to pilot Sitefinity’s newly introduced headless Next.js capabilities, which were later released in November 2024.
Introducing native support for Next.js, a React framework (also available in Blazor and Angular flavors) enabled Sitefinity customers and prospects to leverage one of the fastest growing frontend frameworks for developers to create modern, state-of-the-art digital experiences. The work we’ve conducted with Racing WA showcased Sitefinity’s flexibility and strength in handling complex integrations and we are happy to see the great results they achieved.
