The club website nobody has time to update

Search for your club and look at what comes up. For a lot of clubs it is a website a parent built in 2019. There is a news post about presentation night from two seasons ago, a fixtures page that stops in April, and a contact email for a secretary who moved away. The badge is the old one and the kit in the photos is two sponsors back.

Nobody is proud of it and nobody has time to fix it. The reason is always the same. The site depended on one person, and when they stepped back it froze on the day they stopped. Since then it has been quietly telling everyone who searches for the club that the club stopped too.

Why club websites go stale

It is rarely the design and it is never the hosting. Club websites die for three dull reasons.

• Everything on it is manual. Fixtures are typed in, results are typed in, and the table is updated by hand on a Sunday night. The moment the person doing the typing has a busy month, the whole site goes stale together.
• It cannot be handed over. The login to the website is the login to everything, so giving a keen parent the site means giving them the members list. Quite rightly, nobody does, and the site stays with the one person who is too busy.
• It was built for a launch. It looked great with the new-season photos on it. With nothing new to say it looks abandoned, because it is.

The five things a site needs on a quiet Tuesday

Most people who find the club website want one of five things. They want to know where you play, when, which age groups you run, how to join, and who to contact. A site that has those five right and up to date is doing its job, even if nobody has posted news since March.

Then there are the things that should keep themselves current: this weekend's fixtures, last weekend's results and the table. If those come from the same place the club runs its teams from, they update because the club is running. Nobody has to remember. That is the difference between a site that looks alive and one that needs feeding.

Each team wants its own page with its own address, so a parent can send a link to the under 12s page. It matters for Google too. Proper pages with real addresses get found, and one clever page that shuffles its content around does not.

Who should be allowed to edit it

The website should be the easiest job at the club to hand over, because it has the most willing volunteers. The reason it is hard is access. The fix is a role that can publish a match report, a news post and a page of sponsors, and cannot see a single member's details. Give that to the parent who takes the photos and the site gets updated, because they wanted to do it all along.

One more thing on what goes up. If your club runs under 7s to under 11s, their results and tables should stay off the site. The FA doesn't publish them for the youngest age groups and neither should you. Older age groups are fine. The little ones are there to play.

Three things to do this week

• Read your own site like a new parent. Check where, when, which age groups, how to join and who to contact. Fix whichever of the five is wrong, and there will be at least one.
• Delete what is stale. No news page is better than a news page from 2023. If the club no longer does something, the page should go.
• Give the site an owner and a deputy, and make sure neither of them needs the keys to everything to do it.