The old WordPress site set yellow text on black in all-caps with no rhythm and copy running to the viewport edge. The rebuild restores hierarchy and margin, leads with match-day photography, and surfaces the content the club actually publishes — news, schedule, squads.
Three compounding issues made the old site useless as a club resource.
Visual design broke down
Yellow-on-black, all-caps throughout, no rhythm, text running to the viewport edge. The same problems at every screen size.
Content strategy collapsed
Years of social-only focus left no archive, no depth, nowhere permanent to send a prospective member. Match reports vanished into a feed.
Only three of four squads
One squad was absent entirely and the emphasis tilted toward another — reinforcing real internal tensions about which squads the club valued.
Three years as a club member was the primary research input — I understood the audience, the internal politics, the content needs and the maintenance constraints before a brief existed.
For a volunteer organisation, conventional research would have been friction without value. The right move was to build a demo and show it. Getting visible endorsement from club officers and squad captains before launch mattered for adoption — members look to them for the signal on whether to engage.
I replaced WordPress with 11ty, a static site generator, hosted free on GitHub Pages. But the maintenance problem mattered as much as the design problem: a site only I could update would fail the same way the old one did.
- Full control of layout, no theme constraints
- Static output, zero hosting cost
- No plugins, no update overhead
- Maintainable long after my involvement
Content lives as plain Markdown files in the repo, with a clear folder structure. I showed non-technical members how to add a match report or photo gallery by editing a text file — no CMS, no editor UI, no WordPress knowledge.
This reframed the site from a design project into an operational tool the club could actually own.
The site launched and has published a match report and photo gallery for every match since. Its first real recruiting test — the Youth Kitted squad launch — worked: social drove awareness, the site provided the depth, and the squad is now training.
The site-to-social coordination still needs work — post timing isn't aligned yet. That's an identified next step, not a design failure.
demonstrates
Full ownership end-to-end — brief, strategy, design, front-end, deployment, training others.
Content strategy as a design problem — the failure wasn't only visual.
Inclusive organisational thinking — resolving a four-squad equity issue through IA.
Technical decisions in service of design goals — static + Markdown for sustainability.
