The Netball Club That Runs Its Own Website

A netball club's website is its front door. Registration dates, fixtures, uniform sizes, who to call about umpiring, which sponsors keep the lights on. Parents check it at 9pm the night before a game.

The hard part for a club like Kingscliff isn't building that site. It's still having it in three years.

Volunteer committees turn over. A president does two or three seasons, a secretary steps up, someone's kids age out and the family moves on. Whatever the website was built in usually leaves with the person who built it, along with the logins. Every club knows the outcome: a site nobody can update, a season of fixtures that never changed, and eventually a committee giving up and running everything through a Facebook page.

Kingscliff had an old WordPress site and active social accounts, and the same exposure everyone else has. What they needed wasn't a prettier website. It was one that would still be theirs, and still be editable, after the people who commissioned it had moved on.

We built the club a new site, and then spent as much care on the part nobody sees: an admin the committee can actually use.

There are no passwords. An approved committee member goes to the admin address, types their email, and Cloudflare sends a single-use code that expires in ten minutes. Nothing to store in a password manager, nothing to hand over in a shoebox at the AGM.

The editor is deliberately not a page builder. The committee edits content: the home page copy, teams by age group, the calendar, news articles, sponsors and their tiers, uniforms and prices, committee contacts, policy links, the umpiring pathway. They can't move the navigation, change the fonts, restyle a page or break the layout, because those aren't offered. The design stays intact no matter who's editing.

Every field has a line of help underneath it saying where that text appears on the site. There's a five-step guided tour on the dashboard for anyone who wants showing around, and a full written guide with step-by-step recipes for the jobs a club actually does: add a news article, add a sponsor, roll the site into a new season.

Saving and publishing are separate. Save keeps your work private. Publish pushes it live and shows you the build running, so you know whether the site has actually updated rather than guessing. Photos get resized and converted automatically on upload, so nobody has to think about file sizes.

The club manages its own editors too. Add the incoming secretary, remove the outgoing one. The system won't let you remove yourself or the last remaining editor, which is the one mistake that would lock the committee out of its own site.

The club owns all of it. The domain is registered in the club's name against its ABN, and the hosting account is in the president's name. Nothing is held in our account, so nothing depends on us still being around.

Running costs are about twenty dollars a year for the domain. The hosting itself is free at this size, and there's no monthly subscription for a website platform.

The president edits and publishes the site herself. That's the whole test, and it's passed: content changes and photo swaps are made by the club, not requested from us.

Handover isn't an event that has to be repeated. A new committee member gets added as an editor, opens the guide, takes the tour, and is editing the same day. No training session to book, nothing to remember, and no knowledge sitting with one person.