Kingston FC
Kingston FC needed a digital presence that felt as ambitious as the club itself — not another templated grassroots football site. I built a 10-page, CMS-powered site with strong local identity, fast static hosting and an editing setup the committee can actually use. Year-one running costs stay under £15.
The setting
Kingston Upon Thames lost its long-standing senior football club when Kingstonian FC relocated to Ashford. A new committee formed Kingston FC to fill the gap — ambitious, community-first, building from scratch.
Every rival grassroots club in the area was either on a templated Pitchero site or an outdated custom build. There was a clear opening: a modern, professional web presence that the committee could actually run themselves, on a grassroots budget.
"Built for Kingston. Built to Climb."
Constraints
- Grassroots budget — annual run-cost had to stay near zero.
- Non-technical committee — content updates by people who don't write code.
- Mobile-first — 70%+ of sports traffic lands on a phone.
- SEO from day one — new club, uncontested local search terms worth claiming.
Research before pixels
Before any design, I produced the report pack I run on every build:
- Brand extraction — pulled the palette, typography and tone from the committee's existing badge and socials. Locked in Kingston Gold (#C59927), Royal Blue (#172BA0), Striking Red (#DD2D25) on Pitch White.
- Competitor analysis — benchmarked six local clubs' sites on quality, platform and estimated traffic. Identified the template-fatigue gap.
- Niche & SEO report — mapped the uncontested search terms the new club could own within 3–6 months.
- Build brief — locked the scope: 10 pages, CMS-editable news/fixtures/squad, Netlify hosting.
- Quality audit — accessibility, SEO and performance baseline before launch.
- Client deliverable pack — the final handover document the chairman signs off on.
What shipped
Ten pages — Home, About, Fixtures, News, Squad, Gallery, Sponsors, Contact, Join, 404 — plus dynamic news articles rendered from markdown.
Three opinionated decisions
- Eleventy over a JS framework. Static HTML, zero client-side JS by default, £0 hosting on Netlify, trivially portable.
- Decap CMS for the committee. A writeable admin route backed by git commits. The chairman can post a match report from his phone; the site rebuilds itself.
- Brand-first hero, results-second. The elite clubs I benchmarked lead with identity. Fixtures and results matter, but the first thing a prospective player or sponsor sees is who Kingston FC are.
kingston-fc@main:~$ tree --essentials
├── src/_data # structured club data
├── src/content/news # markdown news posts
├── src/_includes # nunjucks templates + partials
├── src/admin # decap cms config
├── css/ # single stylesheet
├── js/ # vanilla interaction + motion
└── netlify.toml # build + deploy config
What surprised me
- The reports did more selling than the design. The niche analysis — showing exactly which search terms the club could claim — was what got immediate sign-off.
- Mobile menu overlap was the sneakiest bug and took three passes to kill properly across iOS Safari.
- Decap's git-backed editing was the unlock for the committee — no credentials to share, no database to babysit.
Handover
The site shipped ready for live operations. Committee can run news, fixtures, squad, sponsors and gallery updates without touching code. Netlify forms handle the Contact and Join routes. SEO, Open Graph and sitemap baseline all in place.
Year-one run-cost projects at under £15 — domain only — against a typical agency quote of £3,000–£8,000 for a comparable build.
What's next
- Fixtures automation — pull from the league feed once the season starts.
- Sponsor PDF pack generated straight from the CMS.
- Match-day gallery workflow so photos land on the site within an hour of full-time.