Salisbury Racecourse
Bespoke WordPress site with booking system
Salisbury Racecourse is one of the city’s most iconic venues and the second oldest racecourse in the UK, dating back to 1584. It hosts 16 race meetings every season and serves as a venue for countless events throughout the year, from conferences to wedding receptions.
We refreshed the racecourse’s brand identity and built a bespoke WordPress website to enhance its online presence and allow it to sell tickets online with ease.
The project
Salisbury Racecourse’s old branding was outdated and the website lacked functionality. To bring the business into the 21st century and stand out from other racecourses in the UK, we delivered a modern brand refresh, including a new logo and brand guidelines, complete with a bespoke-built WordPress site.
With flawless design, image-led pages and versatile functionality, the site positions the venue as more than just a racecourse. The site is easy for the Salisbury Racecourse team to content manage, ensuring that it is always kept up to date with the latest events.
What we delivered
Slick WordPress website with integrated booking system
We designed and built a slick WordPress website with a feature-rich integrated booking system. Our development team built an innovative event booking plugin into the site, which allowed us to design event elements that are cohesive with the overall branding.
Working with the racecourse’s chosen third-party ticketing system, the site has transactional functionality to allow customers to purchase tickets online. We have incorporated this ticketing system into the site’s booking functionality, providing a seamless experience for customers with an interactive timeline for the ‘What’s On’ page, making it easy for customers to sift through upcoming events.
Updated logo and brand guidelines
Salisbury Racecourse requested a modernisation of their historic logo that was suitable to use across all marketing collateral – both print and digital. Our design team refreshed the logo, keeping the original components of the horse, jockey, cathedral and horseshoe but adding a refined, modern colour palette in a silhouette style.
We even used a winning horse and jockey from 2020 as inspiration for the logo – the pair were traced and stylised to add an extra sentimental touch.
The overall branding combines upmarket luxury with the rural nature of the Racecourse. The colour palette features the muted green and grey tones of the logo with a complimentary secondary colour palette of soft blue, purple, pink and gold. This highlights certain areas of the site and ensures that it appeals to a diverse audience.
Additional functionality and design work
Other unique functionality of the site includes a countdown until the next race day, a live weather feature for each event page and options to share the event pages on multiple social media platforms. A custom-built megamenu also ensures a seamless user journey with easy navigation.
The site features enhanced search functionality, too. Unlike basic search functionalities that only scan titles on the site, this search function looks at every file on the site to find the most relevant content for users.
Additionally, our design team redesigned an illustrated map of the racecourse to help guests find their way around the course. This can be viewed on the website, downloaded as a pdf and seen on print media produced by the racecourse.