You didn’t sign up to run a website. You signed up to help the club. But somewhere in the handover, someone passed you ‘the website’, and now it’s yours. The good news is that a community club website only has a few real jobs. Get those right and you can ignore most of the rest. This guide covers what a club website has to do, what makes it hard for volunteers, what to keep simple, and how to set it up so it survives the next committee change.
Most community club websites are run by someone who never asked for the job. A new treasurer, a parent on the committee, or the one person who is ‘good with computers’. At CJ Digital, a web design studio in Hawthorn, Melbourne, we build sites for local small businesses and community groups. The club sites that work are the ones built for that reality: simple to update, hard to break, and easy to hand on. Here is what matters.
A community club website has a short list of real jobs, and most clubs only need it to do four or five things well. The rest is decoration. Before you touch anything, work out which of these your club depends on.
That last point trips up a lot of clubs. You don’t need your website to take payments, store member data or run the draw. Your registration platform already does that. The website is the front door, not the back office.
A club website is hard to keep up because the people running it change every year, and almost none of them are paid or technical. That is the real problem, and no feature fixes it.
Think about how a club committee works. People rotate on and off. The person who built the site three seasons ago has moved on, and they took the login with them. The new committee inherits a website nobody can edit, hosted somewhere nobody can name, on a domain the club may not even own.
Money is tight too. A community club is not a business. Every dollar is raised at the canteen or the trivia night, so there is no budget for a developer on call. The site has to keep working with no one watching it.
And the person holding it together is a volunteer with a day job. They can give an hour here and there, usually in a panic during registration week. A club site that needs technical skill to update is a club site that goes stale by July.
We see this most in Melbourne’s outer suburbs, where junior footy, netball and cricket clubs run on a handful of parents. A netball club in Berwick or a footy club in Melton might have four hundred members and one committee meeting a month. The website sits low on the list until the week sign-ups open. Then it matters more than anything.
A club website should prioritise three things: being easy to update, fast on a phone, and connected to the registration system the club already uses. It can skip almost everything else.
Easy to update comes first. If a volunteer can’t change a fixture, add a sponsor logo or post a result without ringing a developer, the site will rot. A simple WordPress site lets a non-technical committee member edit a page in a few minutes. That one thing decides whether the site stays current from one season to the next.
Fast on a phone comes second. Parents check the draw from the sideline, not from a desk. If your fixtures page is slow or hard to read on a phone, people give up and ask in the group chat instead.
Connected comes third, and it is the part clubs get wrong most often. Depending on your sport and league, your club is usually told to use a platform like PlayHQ, GameDay or revolutioniseSPORT. Associations and not-for-profits often use a member system like TidyHQ instead. You rarely get to choose, because the state body or league mandates it. Your website’s job is not to replace that platform. It is to point members to it without confusion.
Here is the split that keeps a club site simple:
| What the website should own | What the registration platform should own |
|---|---|
| The public front door: who we are, fixtures, events, news and contact details | Member sign-ups and renewals |
| A clear ‘Register now’ button that links straight to the right form | Payments and refunds |
| Club info, sponsor logos, directions to the ground and canteen hours | Member data and contact lists |
| News and results posts members can read at a glance | Team lists, draws and official results |
When the website tries to do the platform’s job, you end up keeping the same information in two places. Members get confused about where to pay, and the data goes out of date. Let each tool do what it is built for.
What can you skip? Most of the extras. You don’t need a custom app, a members-only forum or live streaming unless the club genuinely runs on them. Every feature you add is something the next volunteer has to keep alive. Volunteer rosters for the canteen or the gate usually live in your registration platform or a shared spreadsheet, not the website, so leave them there.
One thing worth keeping current, though, is the basic club information. Many grant applications ask whether the club has a working website and how it reaches members, so a current, tidy site can help your funding case at the same time.
You keep a club website going by treating it as club property, not personal property. The site, the domain and the logins should belong to the club, and they should be written down somewhere the next committee can find them.
This is where a lot of clubs get caught. If the website was built by a member, a sponsor’s mate or an agency on a lock-in contract, the club can be left unable to log in, unable to edit, or unable to move the site at all. Before you build or rebuild, ask three plain questions. Does the club own the domain name? Does the club own the site and its content? Can a future committee take it elsewhere if they need to? If the answer to any is no, fix that first.
Then write the important details down. A handover that lives in one person’s head disappears the moment they step off the committee.
The handover list every committee should keep
Keep this in a shared club document, not in one person’s inbox:
The club sites that last all share one trait: they are simple and owned. The ones that fall apart are the clever ones built around a single volunteer who has since moved interstate. We’ve built sites for Melbourne clubs and small businesses for more than a decade, and the pattern is always the same. Keep it plain, keep it in the club’s name, and keep the logins written down.
There is one more reason to get this right now. More members find a club the way they find everything else: they search. A parent typing ‘junior cricket near me’, or asking an AI assistant where to sign their child up, will be shown the club whose fixtures, fees and contact details are clear and current. Clubs with stale, broken or locked-out sites simply won’t come up. A simple, owned, easy-to-update website is not admin. It is how the next generation of members finds you.
If your committee has inherited a club website nobody can edit, or you’re starting from a blank page before sign-up season, talk to CJ Digital about a low-maintenance club website built to be handed on. We will show you how to keep it simple, owned, and easy for the next volunteer to run.
A community club website usually costs less than a business site because it needs fewer features and no online store. A simple, easy-to-update site that links to your registration platform is a modest one-off cost, plus a small yearly amount for the domain and hosting. The bigger saving is time: a site a volunteer can update avoids paying someone every season.
Yes, a website still helps even if your club uses PlayHQ, GameDay or revolutioniseSPORT. Those platforms handle registration and results, but they are not built to be your public front door. A website tells new members who you are, why to join, and where to sign up, then sends them to the platform to do it.
A volunteer can update a club website without technical skills if it is built on a simple system like WordPress with an easy editor. Changing a fixture, adding a sponsor or posting a result should take a few minutes and no code. If updating your current site needs a developer, that is a sign it was built wrong for a club.
The club should own its website and domain name, not the individual who set them up. Domains and logins held in a member’s personal account are the most common reason a committee gets locked out. Register the domain in the club’s name, keep admin access with the committee, and record both in a shared handover document.
The best setup for most clubs is a simple, self-manageable website kept separate from the registration platform the league mandates. WordPress is easy for volunteers to edit and easy to hand on. Your registration system (PlayHQ, GameDay, revolutioniseSPORT or TidyHQ) sits alongside it and handles sign-ups, payments and results.
You stop a club website going stale by keeping it simple and writing down how to update it. A site with fewer moving parts needs less attention. Keep a one-page guide and the logins in a shared club file, so any committee member can refresh fixtures and dates without waiting on the one person who knows how.
