Paddock

Nothing Rented is a five-part series from Queen City Garage on how we built our own email and RSVP systems for NASCAR Sundays instead of renting them. Read the whole series.

Paddock is our own RSVP system. (In racing, the paddock is where the teams work.) We started building it on May 19. On June 8 we switched every RSVP button on nascarsundays.com from Luma, the event website we had been renting, to Paddock.

Renting had meant every party lived in two places, our site and Luma's, and every guest left our site to sign up. Paddock was built to end both.

What a guest sees. Each party has one page on our site, with the race, the time, the venue and a map. The RSVP form is on that page, so nobody leaves. You give a name and an email, and a phone number if you like. If you are bringing friends, you say how many and add their names. A confirmation arrives from NASCAR Sundays, in our design, with your party listed, sent through the same email system described in the last post.

If a venue has a cap, Paddock counts people, not forms, so a party of four takes four spots, and the form tells you plainly when the room is full. If an event needs a waiver, it is signed on the same form.

What we see. There is one copy of every event. When a start time or a venue changes, we change it once, and the page, the form and the confirmation change together. The guest list is in our own dashboard, where we can see who is coming, export it and email everyone attending a given party. Paddock also records where each RSVP came from, so we can see which posts and partners fill a room.

What a person did: decided what a guest should have to type, and nothing more. What the machine did: built one page, one form, one list.