Racing Pages - the early days

The site was created in April 1996, at that time there were only a handful of Australian horse racing sites on the net.

Getting people to understand the concept was at times a little challenging.

On one occasion, after about 15 minutes of discussion with a prominent trainer, the response was " Sounds terrific mate - what's the internet?".

At the start of '96 the NSW government had decided to ban all selection and tipping services from advertising in the press. This meant that the site picked up a lot of advertisers who were operating these types of services for punters.

Feature doubles charts were popular with a number of bookmakers using the site to display their prices. Initially the charts were provided in Excel and they were then converted into Word documents and saved in .html format with the subsequent code being pasted into the web page.

A sample chart from that time can be viewed at Doncaster - Sydney Cup Doubles Chart

Some of the pages from that period look a little dated now, for example, Turf Monthly January 1998

Thoroughbred studs were quick to utilise the new technology and Racing Pages hosted sites for quite a few, some of whom are still clients today.

A lot of the early advertisers subsequently developed and operated their own sites as the web came to be more accepted as an information/advertising medium.

The Melbourne Cup period is always the peak time for traffic through the site, with Cup day itself being by far the busiest day of the year.

As the Cup is the focal point of the Australian horse racing year, the finish photo is always added to the selection of past winners which are randomly displayed at the top of this page.