Responses by Sam Harte, account planner, Courtney Stafford, assistant account planner and James McCollum, digital project manager, Cornett

Background: The new Lane’s End website is a game changer within the thoroughbred breeding industry. Its main purpose is to provide accessible information on the stallions that are available for breeding, as well as to encourage breeders to easily submit a mare online. Since most of the target audiences are horse breeders, owners and trainers who can’t always visit the farm in person to see the stallions, providing comprehensive information and visuals of the horses are extremely important.

Highlights: The 360-degree conformation shots of the stallions. A conformation shot is a static image of the stallion posed or conformed to a particular stance. Cornett came up with a Matrix-like concept to photograph the stallion from all angles.

Challenges: It was a challenging four-month long process to plan, configure and strategize how to make the images come to life. We partnered with Click 360° to pull off the actual photography portion of the five-day shoot. We set up a custom rig, leveled out a round pen at the farm and set up 60 cameras along the pen fence. Getting the horses into their conformation poses was another obstacle, because they had to hold the pose long enough for all 60 cameras to fire on a seven-second re-cycle time. Once the shoot was complete, the Cornett team did a lot of photoshop work to cut out the backgrounds of each shot, ensuring that each of the images were level to prevent the image from jumping when in rotation.

Favorite details: The Submit A Mare form on the site had a dated layout, so we wanted to elevate that experience. The revenue generated by this portion of the site is significant, so we wanted to drive conversation with an audited and improved user experience. We also made the form very visual and culled down the options that users have to fill out.

Navigational structure: The navigational structure was developed to bring prominence to the main business drivers of the farm. We paid homage to the previous site structure by keeping the navigation on the left-hand side. The hidden navigation opens into a two-column navigation path that leads through the main areas of the farm based on revenue generation.

Alternative approach: If we could go back and do this again, we’d probably build a rig from the ground up without using a circular pen. We’d also make sure we shot on level ground—the round pen was covered in sand so the camera rig sank into it as we photographed the horses throughout the day.