Royal Yachting Association

RYA Portsmouth Yardstick Race Analysis

The Brief

The Royal Yachting Association were looking to update their Portsmouth Yardstick website that was feeling a bit tired. The client was after something and someone to take on the challenge of analysing race scores and calculating handicaps for each yacht using the Portsmouth Yardstick system. ComputerMinds were recommended to the RYA by a previous client and seeing as we have a Master of Mathematics on our team, we were the perfect fit!

 

The RYA needed a website that could calculate these results reliably, accurately, and seamlessly without the processing of large amounts of data slowing the site down. In addition, they needed a website that was easy for editors and site users to use that included the ability to produce reports and certificates. 

Our Solution

We used Drupal to provide not only an easy to use, secure CMS with great features, but a solid foundation for capturing and processing lots of custom data. Updates since have improved the data upload process, helping clubs process race data faster.

Image of a line graph. The Y axis is PY and the X axis is Date.
A table with various statistics around the ranking position for different sail boats.

Maths, Graphs and Algorithms.

This site is based on accurate calculations of race scores, so this is where we started; by taking the existing algorithms and translating them into mathematical calculations that could drive the development of the rest of the site.

We simplified the maths without compromising functionality. Along the way we reorganised how the data is stored on the website and we created a unique profile specifically for clubs and club-members to enter new data to the site.

With the data, we were able to produce graphs and tables in a way that wasn't possible before. This included a PDF generation function, which allows clubs and club-members to print off officially sanctioned certificates that prove their handicap scores.

Data Migration

With about 1 million records to precisely migrate to the new website, we carefully matched data from the old website to the new one. Then we meticulously tested the website ensuring every calculation was accurate and matched the data on the old website.

Hosting

When we take on new clients we like to discuss the whole package of support that we can offer, this includes hosting, development and maintenance. In this case as part of our re-design of the PY Online website we moved the website hosting to Platform.sh.

Platform.sh is a reliable and secure cloud-based website hosting infrastructure. It removes the complexities of website-hosting and ensures super-fast deployment for any website.

Since we had such a large amount of data to migrate to the new website we were able to increase the plan size in Platform.sh make the data migration super speedy. Once the migration was complete we were able to downgrade plan size in Platform.sh to something more appropriate to control costs. This type of flexibility is one the great assets of Platform.sh.
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Success

We are really pleased with what we have been able to achieve with this website. It was a new type of project for us and we thoroughly enjoyed it. The RYA were a pleasure to work with, making the whole project that much easier.
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