Sharing passion and knowledge is a deep part of our shared human experience - and it’s so much more convenient with a website!
In the best cases, that passion and knowledge can even lead to winning awards! And that’s exactly what our client Vanderbilt Cup Races experienced. These earliest, important vehicle races, held on Long Island from 1904 to 1910, were a key part of the progress and development of automobile technology and societal integration.
The Vanderbilt Cup Races site, started in 2008 by Howard Kroplick, with the help of his daughter, Dana Kyle, has become one of the leading automotive history websites. Its incredible online community is a vast resource for information, photos, and statistics about the Vanderbilt Cup Races.
Kroplick, who was born and raised on Long Island, has long been passionate about preserving history and vintage cars. These passions came together to form the award-winning site that Hop Studios has worked on since 2020.
In 2012, the site won two Webby awards for the automotive and sports category. In 2013, the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences selected it as one of the five best sites in the world for “car sites and car culture”! Most recently, the Society of Automotive Historians honoured the site in 2019 with the E.P. Ingersoll Award for excellence in the presentation of automotive history outside of print media.
Talk about an impressive array of awards and recognitions!
Performing the CMS upgrade and ongoing maintenance of this site was a real treat for Hop Studios. Our initial upgrade of ExpressionEngine from version 2 to version 5 (the latest at the time) greatly improved the security and performance of the site. Notably, this updated the site’s admin interface, making it easier for administrators to make frequent changes to the active site.
The last update to the CMS had been seven years prior, so some upgrades were also made to PHP and several add-ons, including Assets, Freeform Next, Hop Deeploy Helper, and WYGWAM.
Along with the updates, we also removed any outdated and unnecessary add-ons and plugins, which streamlined the site’s performance. We also migrated the site to Nexcess web hosting. Nexcess makes it easy to migrate with their free migration, and along with the added security and comprehensive support, we knew that Vanderbilt Cup Races would be in capable hosting hands.
To ensure this thriving community could continue to share the historical automotive history and users could chime in, we implemented a new system for comment moderation functions. Implementing a moderation system where every new comment needed an administrator to review them before publication ensured the quality and accuracy of posted comments. Snaptcha (an effective third-party spam prevention add-on) was installed on the site and helped to reduce spam and bot comments.
It’s a pleasure to be part of history (whether making it or preserving it), and working with the Vanderbilt Cup Races award-winning site has been nothing short of wonderful.
We look forward to assisting them with their site’s evolving needs and as the site grows, seeing what history they uncover next.
