“This new app and website will bring one of the state’s most treasured traditions into the 21st century,” Governor Cuomo said. “With new tools on the website and on mobile phones, it has never been easier to plan a day at the fair and see the very best this state has to offer. I encourage all to use these tools and take a trip this year to the Great New York State Fair.”
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The new app is available for free in the Apple and Google Play marketplaces. Within the app, users can scroll through hourly events and musical shows to build a custom itinerary. When an event is added to the itinerary, fairgoers will get a reminder 5 minutes before it begins. The app also features the “Food Finder,” which uses GPS to pinpoint a user’s exact location and shows the location of Fair food vendors.

Communication is another important function in the app. Buttons for Facebook and Twitter allow users to see posts and tweets from the Fair in real time, while the Messages section gives the Fair the ability to push important or urgent information to all app users at once.

The app is tied directly to the new website, www.nysfair.org, which allows content changes to happen instantly across both platforms. The website had not been updated since its last renovation in 2012. Since then, web browsing has moved to phones and tablets. Today, more than half of all visits to the State Fair website are from mobile devices. In response to this, the new website is now mobile-responsive – adjusting its design based on its screen size, whether the site is being accessed on a desktop computer with a widescreen monitor or on a cellphone with a narrow screen.

Troy Waffner, Acting Fair Director, said, “We are always looking for new ways to improve our visitors’ experience at the Great New York State Fair and that starts long before they walk through our gates. By providing a newly streamlined website with high-functioning compatible app, we’re making sure fairgoers have available the latest information on the fair and its year-round events at the touch of a button.”

The new website was built to handle large volumes of traffic during State Fair season, with upwards of 50,000 visitors each day. Other improvements include a more vibrant color scheme, the color-coded navigation bar floating at the top of each page as the user scrolls down the screen, and the ability to deliver shortcuts to users based on keywords to make searches successful more quickly.

The website’s longtime feature that helps people build an itinerary for their Fair visit is also enhanced. Thousands of events take place during the 12-day run of the Fair, including more than 500 free musical performances. It can be daunting to try to plan a day at the Fair, so improved website tools present the Fair’s events in several different ways to make planning easier and help build an itinerary: by day, time and venue.

The website integrates all content related both to the 12 days of the Fair and also to the year-round use of the fairgrounds for hundreds of events, ending the practice of changing the entire website for each season.

About New York State Fair
The New York State Fair, operated by the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets, runs from August 27 to September 7, 2015. The Fair’s mission, reflected in its 2015 theme, “Summer’s Best in Show,” is to showcase the best of New York agriculture while providing top-quality entertainment. This year’s tagline – “New Attractions, Old Favorites, Timeless Fun” – highlights the more than two dozen new events and attractions and the expansion or enhancement of several Fairgoer favorites.

In addition to the annual New York State Fair, the Fairgrounds host dozens of agricultural events throughout the year, including some of the Northeast’s most prestigious horse and livestock shows.

The home of the Great New York State Fair is a 375-acre exhibit and entertainment complex that operates all year. A year-round schedule of events is available on the Fair’s website. Find The Great New York State Fair on Facebook, follow @NYSFair on Twitter, and enjoy photos from the Fair at Flickr.com/photos/nysfair. Also, New Yorkers are invited to send their ideas for the Great New York State Fair at statefairideas@agriculture.ny.gov.

Media Contacts:
Jola Szubielski
Public Information Officer
NYS Department of Agriculture & Markets
518-457-0752

Dave Bullard
Public Relations
New York State Fair
315-487-7711 x 1377