For football, cricket, rugby, netball and hockey clubs

Run by volunteers, for people who will not read an email.

A grassroots club's website has an unusual job. It is a shop window for new players and sponsors, a noticeboard for members who half-read things, and evidence for a funding body that you exist and are properly run. Most clubs try to do all three on a Facebook page.

Start my website What is included

Written for your businessPage count follows the briefPreview before launch

Three audiences

What each of them needs from you

New players and parents

Training nights, age groups, what it costs, and who to contact. The most common reason a club does not grow is that this is genuinely hard to find.

Funders and the league

Constitution, committee, safeguarding officer, accreditation. The things that get asked for at the worst possible moment.

Existing members

Fixtures, training changes, subs deadlines, the AGM. A permanent place beats a post that scrolls away in a day.

Away teams

Ground address, postcode, parking, changing rooms, whether there is a bar afterwards. A small kindness that clubs remember.

The club's own story

Founded when, what it has won, what it is for. Volunteers underestimate how much this matters to a parent choosing between two clubs.

The volunteer problem, and how we have tried to solve it

Club websites die for one reason. Somebody’s nephew builds one, it is lovely for a season, and then he goes to university and nobody else has the login. Two years later it still says last year’s fixtures and the secretary who left in 2021.

We have built this so there is nothing to hand over. You do not get a login you will lose or a system somebody has to learn. When the fixtures come out, the secretary emails them to us and we put them up. When the subs go up, message us. When a new sponsor signs, send the logo.

It is included in the monthly cost, there is no limit on how often, and it does not depend on any one volunteer still being around. For a club that has been through two or three abandoned websites already, that tends to be the part that sells it.

What it costs in club terms

£47A month

Less than most clubs spend on match balls over a season.

1Sponsor covers it

A single shirt sponsor at a typical rate pays for the site and then some.

0Volunteers tied to it

Nothing to maintain, nothing to hand over, no login to lose.

Committee questions

The things that come up at the meeting

Can we display results and league tables?

Fixtures and results, yes — send them and we publish them. Live-updating league tables usually come from your league's own site and we link straight to it rather than duplicating something that will go stale.

We have a Facebook group that works fine. Why do we need more?

For members, it does. For a parent searching for a junior football club in your town it is close to invisible, and for a sponsor deciding whether you are a serious outfit it is not much help either. They complement each other.

Who owns it if the committee changes?

The club does. The domain is registered for you and we transfer it free of charge whenever you ask. That is deliberately different from the nephew arrangement.

We need it for a funding application in three weeks. Can you manage that?

That is comfortably enough time. Tell us the deadline and we will work to it.

The two conversations a club site quietly wins for you

Asking a local business for money

Every club treasurer knows the walk into the trade counter or the estate agent’s office. You are asking for four hundred pounds and the honest answer to “what do we get out of it” is usually a mumble about shirts.

A sponsorship page changes the shape of that conversation. It sets out the tiers, what each one includes, how many people come through the ground in a season and where their name will appear. You send the link before you go in. They read it, and you arrive to a decision rather than an explanation.

Persuading a parent to bring a child down

They are not weighing you against the club two miles away on the strength of your first team’s league position. They want to know their child will be welcomed, that the coach has been checked, that there is a session for beginners and that turning up in trainers on the first night is fine.

None of that is hard to write. It is just that hardly any club writes it, so the club that does tends to get the phone call.

A club website that outlasts the committee that ordered it

£47 a month, nothing for a volunteer to maintain, and the domain belongs to the club.

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