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Running your site · 5 min read

Running a club website with volunteers

Most clubs run on goodwill and Tuesday nights. Here’s how to keep the website going when people come and go.

FootballGloves.co.uk ·

The club website usually belongs to whoever set it up. Then they move on, and nobody knows the password, where it’s hosted or who pays the bill. These are the habits that stop that happening.

One account per person

Never share one admin login. Give each volunteer their own account with only the permissions they need — an editor can publish news without being able to break the site. When someone leaves, remove their account. That’s it.

Write down the three things

Where the domain is registered, where the site is hosted, and who pays for both. Keep it somewhere the committee — not one person — can reach, and make sure the domain renewal goes to a club address, not someone’s personal inbox.

Make publishing boring

The fewer decisions a volunteer has to make, the more often they’ll post. Templates for match reports and signings, a fixed image size, and fields for the things that repeat (score, opponent, scorers) mean a report takes ten minutes and always looks right.

Leave the plumbing to someone

Updates, security patches, backups and certificates aren’t volunteer jobs. They’re invisible when done and a disaster when not. Whether it’s us or someone else, make sure a named person or company is responsible for them.

Roles, not people, for email

Use addresses like secretary@ and media@ on the club’s own domain, so the mail stays with the role when the person changes.