Arabian CMS

Equine enthusiasts have been carefully breeding Arabian horses for well over a century. How do we know? They keep incredibly detailed records.

These records are a crucial part of the industry, with international shows happening every month where farm owners and their marketing teams meet to compete, promote, and trade breeding rights. Unfortunately, digital tools for managing these records at the farm level aren't easy to use and often miss the features these marketing teams need most. Here's how we solved these problems with a custom CMS now being used by Arabian horse farms from Arizona to Belgium.

There's nothing better than users who really know what they need.

We were lucky to work alongside industry giants with decades of experience in the traditional Arabian horse industry. Their insider perspective allowed us to zero in on the features owners want and the pain-points they face.

Based on this knowledge, we scoped out a six-screen experience using Wordpress as an app-development framework. The system would allow easy management of horse details like breed, lineage, progeny, and marketing assets like photos and video.

It would also offer a smart pedigree engine that could understand and autofill genetic relationships based on the existing genealogy database, dramatically speeding up the documentation of these complex bloodlines. All of this would exist as a layer on top of WordPress, using backend functionality to support rapid development while dropping the blog-focused UI in favor of something purpose-built for Arabian breeders.

We involved future users (marketers, farm owners) throughout the design and development process to make sure each feature hit the mark, saving us from baking bad assumptions into the build. They also suggested essential functionality we missed: things like the ability to manually reorder horse profiles on the website ahead of an event were so obvious in retrospect. With every release, the platform got a little better.

One of our product's strongest features was its integration with a custom companion site. All the genealogical data entered in the backend was cleanly presented for potential investors and breeders to view from anywhere, making it a powerful tool for farm owners and sales reps working the Arabian events circuit.

While Arabian CMS is no longer under active development and there's plenty I'd do differently nearly a decade on, it's still one of my favorites. Stepping into a unique community, learning how they think, and helping them tackle old problems in new ways is one of the best parts of my job.

Something tells me I'll find my way back there someday 🐎