The NY International Auto Show
CLIENT
Situation Interactive
TECHNOLOGIES
WordPress, PHP, JavaScript, SASS
YEAR
2018
EXTERNAL URL
The digital platform for the New York International Auto Show — North America’s oldest and largest-attended auto show, drawing over one million visitors annually to the Javits Center. Custom WordPress theme with integrated ticketing, interactive exhibit and experience discovery, and a content architecture built to handle nearly 1,000 vehicles across four exhibition floors. A fundamentally different kind of event site from the theater and summit builds in my portfolio — automotive scale, consumer logistics, and a million-person audience.
Owned the entire build at Situation Interactive.
Background
The largest consumer auto show in North America needed a digital platform that matched its scale.
The New York International Auto Show has run continuously since 1900, making it the first and longest-running automotive exhibition in North America. By 2018, the show had grown to nearly 1,000 vehicles displayed across four floors of the Javits Center, drawing over one million visitors annually and featuring world and North American debuts from every major manufacturer. Situation Interactive — the show’s digital agency of record — brought me on to lead development on a platform rebuild ahead of the 2018 edition. The existing site could not keep pace with the show’s expanding footprint of interactive exhibits, experiences, and ticketing demands. The goal was a WordPress-powered platform that could serve as the show’s primary digital touchpoint for press, consumers, exhibitors, and industry attendees simultaneously.
The timeline was fixed to the show’s press preview days in late March — the site needed to be fully operational before a single journalist walked the floor.
Implementation
Ticketing integration, interactive experiences, and a content layer built for 60+ exhibitors.
The site was built on WordPress with a custom theme architecture using Advanced Custom Fields for structured content management across vehicles, exhibitors, and event programming. The ticketing system was a central focus — I built a frontend integration layer that connected the WordPress site to the show’s third-party ticketing provider, handling ticket type selection, group sales, promotional pricing, and date-specific availability without sending users off-site. The purchase flow stayed on autoshowny.com from discovery through confirmation, giving the show full control over the conversion experience and the data that came with it.
The experiences section showcased the show’s interactive exhibits — ride-and-drive programs, manufacturer activations, test tracks, and hands-on technology demonstrations that had become a major draw beyond the static vehicle displays. I built a filterable discovery interface that let visitors browse experiences by type, manufacturer, and floor location, with detail pages that included scheduling, accessibility information, and wayfinding context. The frontend delivered responsive layouts optimized for mobile-first consumption, built with SASS and vanilla JavaScript to keep page weight low across all viewports. Performance mattered: visitors were planning their show day on phones while standing in line at the Javits Center.
Every content type — vehicles, exhibitors, experiences, ticketing tiers — was modeled as structured data in ACF, giving the show’s marketing team full editorial control without touching code.
Results
Live for press preview, processing tickets for over a million annual visitors.
The platform launched ahead of the 2018 press preview days and remained fully operational through the public show dates from March 30 through April 8. The ticketing integration processed the full volume of consumer ticket sales on-site, eliminating the friction of external redirects and giving the show’s team direct visibility into conversion data for the first time. The experiences section drove meaningful engagement — visitors used it to plan their day around interactive exhibits rather than wandering the floor, which the show’s organizers reported improved traffic flow across the Javits Center’s four levels.
Unlike the theater and summit event sites in my portfolio — which serve niche, culturally engaged audiences — the Auto Show platform had to handle the logistics of a million-person consumer event: ticket type permutations, four floors of wayfinding context, and 60+ exhibitor relationships. The content model proved durable beyond a single year, and autoshowny.com continued to build on the same architecture for subsequent editions of the show.
