DIY vs done-for-you club websites for Irish clubs

Ireland edition. This guide is written for volunteer-run clubs in Ireland. Where rules differ — grants, tax, incorporation, safeguarding — follow the Ireland-specific pointers below or check with your national body.

The motion passes in November. Everyone agrees the website is embarrassing, everyone agrees it should be fixed before registrations open, and one person — usually the one who said the least during the discussion — offers to have a look at it. That offer is made in good faith by a capable adult, and it is where most club website projects begin and quite a few of them end.

By February there is a home page that looks genuinely good. By March there are four more pages, three of which say "coming soon", and the volunteer has discovered that the hard part was never the software. It was writing the junior pathway page, finding a photo of the women's team that somebody is allowed to publish, chasing the treasurer for this year's fee table, and getting a decision out of the committee about whether the club is called the Rovers or the Rovers Sporting Club. None of that is a website problem. All of it lands on the person who volunteered.

This guide is for the committee making that call before anyone volunteers. It compares building the site yourselves with paying somebody to build it for you, on the three axes that decide it in practice — how long you wait for something live, how many volunteer hours each route really consumes, and what happens at the eighteen-month mark when the person who built it has moved on. We offer a setup service as well as a platform you can drive yourself, so we have an interest in both answers; what follows is the ledger we would want a committee to see.

Three routes, not two

The question is usually framed as build it or buy it. There is a third route, and it is the one most committees are actually reaching for when they argue about the first two.

The hybrid is not a compromise between the other two. It is a different structure: somebody else absorbs the setup, and the club takes ownership of the running. That distinction — setup versus running — is the one this whole guide turns on, and it is the one most quotes obscure.

The hours ledger

Money is easy to compare and it is not the interesting number. Hours are, because hours are what community clubs are actually short of. Here is the shape of it. Treat the figures as an illustrative example for a club of a few hundred members with eight or nine pages, not as a quote.

Getting to live

Two things in that table are worth arguing about at a committee meeting.

Done-for-you does not get to zero, and any supplier who implies it will is setting you up to be disappointed. Nobody outside your club knows your fee structure, your junior pathway, your history or which photos you are allowed to publish. Content and decisions stay with you in every route. What a build service removes is the platform learning curve, the design work and the assembly — which is roughly half the total, not all of it.

The DIY total lands on one person. Forty to eighty hours spread across a committee is a project. The same hours resting on a single volunteer between January and March, on top of their job and their kids' fixtures, is how projects stall at seventy per cent. If you go the DIY route, the most important decision is not the platform. It is splitting the work across at least three people with named pages each and a fortnightly check-in.

Keeping it alive

This is the column nobody costs, and it is the one that decides whether the site is any good in a year.

Notice that the running cost is in the same range as the build. A website is not a project with an end; it is a small ongoing job. Any route that makes the build easy and the running hard has optimised the wrong half — which is precisely the trap a done-for-you build falls into when the club cannot edit the result.

Where the build hours actually go

If you have never done this, the intuition is that the hours go on the software. They do not. On a modern club platform the software part is genuinely quick. The hours go on decisions and content, and they go there regardless of who is clicking.

• Deciding what the club is called, in writing. You will find three spellings of your own name across your existing material. Somebody has to choose.
• Getting the fee table signed off. This is the single most common cause of a delayed launch, because it needs the treasurer, and the treasurer is busy.
• Writing the junior pathway page. Nobody has ever written it down. It lives in the junior coordinator's head and takes a two-hour conversation to extract.
• Finding usable photos. Not "any photos" — photos where the club looks good, that somebody took, that you have permission to publish, and that include the teams who will notice if they are absent.
• Agreeing the contact policy. Whose phone number goes on the site, and whose does not.
• Writing the two hundred words about who you are that every prospective member reads and that no supplier can write for you.

The practical implication is a checklist, not a tool choice. Before you commission anything or open any editor, put these six items on an agenda and clear them. A club that arrives at a build with its fee table, its photos and its words ready will get live in a fortnight by either route. A club that does not will take four months by either route, and will blame the software.

The maintenance cliff

Here is the test we would put to any committee, and it is deliberately uncomfortable.

Name the person who will update the fixture page in eighteen months' time. Not the role — the person. If you cannot, your build route matters far less than your handover plan.

Eighteen months is the interval because it clears one AGM and usually one committee turnover. It is long enough that the enthusiasm of the launch has gone and short enough that the site should still be current. Clubs that fail this test do not fail dramatically. The site simply freezes: last year's committee, last season's fees, a sponsor who left, and a news feed whose most recent item is the launch announcement.

Four ways clubs fall off the cliff, in rough order of frequency:

1. The builder was the only one who could edit it. One login, one person, and the knowledge left with them. This is the classic failure of both a DIY build by a technical volunteer and a done-for-you build by an outside supplier — different causes, identical result.
2. Editing is intimidating. The site was built with a level of craft the next volunteer cannot match, so they leave it alone rather than risk breaking it. A slightly plainer site that four people are happy to edit beats a beautiful one that nobody dares touch.
3. Nothing prompts anyone. No owner, no recurring agenda item, no reminder. The site is never anybody's job this week.
4. The money or the access sat with an individual. A renewal on a personal card, a domain in a personal account, a login nobody else has. This ends sites permanently, and it is entirely preventable.

Two habits fix most of this. Put "website" on the committee agenda as a standing five-minute item with a named owner — not to discuss it, just to confirm what needs changing. And make sure at least three people have their own admin access at all times, which is what roles and permissions are for: a team manager who can post results but cannot delete a page, a treasurer who can see payments, a secretary who can do everything. Fold the website into your ordinary committee handover checklist so it is transferred like the bank signatories rather than like a hobby.

As an illustrative example for clubs in Ireland — get your own quotes — a freelance build for a community club commonly lands between €1,500 and €6,000 depending on scope and how much content you supply, with agencies charging more. A platform's setup service is usually a few hundred euro because it is assembly rather than bespoke design. Where the club is preparing a grant application, ask explicitly whether digital work is eligible rather than assuming it is excluded.

The hybrid — built for you, run by you

This is the route we would recommend to most community clubs, and it has a specific shape rather than being a vague middle. Somebody else does the setup; the club takes the keys; nothing about running the site afterwards requires that person again.

What makes it work is the handover, and a handover is a thing you specify in advance rather than hope for. Before you accept any build — from a supplier, a platform service or your own technical volunteer — require all of this:

• Every account is in the club's name, on a club email address, with billing on a club card.
• The domain is registered to the club and at least two current committee members can access it.
• At least three people have their own admin logins. Not a shared one.
• Someone who has never seen the site can add a news post while you watch. Time them.
• Someone can change the fee table without asking anyone.
• Editing content cannot break the layout of the page.
• There is a written one-page note listing what is where and who to contact for what.
• You can export your member list and your content today, without permission.
• Nothing about the site depends on a plugin, licence or account held by an individual.
• The person who built it has been removed from any access they no longer need.

That list is the difference between a hybrid and a dependency. A build you cannot edit is not a website; it is a subscription to somebody else's availability.

The corollary for DIY builds is the same list applied to your own volunteer. Being on the committee does not exempt anyone from the handover — most lost club websites were built by an insider, not an outsider.

Clubs in Ireland planning a rebuild should ask their Local Sports Partnership and local authority about small community and capability grants, and check whether digital work is eligible under any capital or equipment round the club is already preparing. Frame the application around participation growth and reduced volunteer workload rather than around the site itself.

What a public club site has to get right either way

Whichever route you take, a few obligations attach to publishing pages about real people, and they are easy to build in at the start and painful to retrofit.

The universal ones: publish a privacy notice that says what you collect and why; get permission before publishing photographs of junior members and give families a way to say no; keep contact details for individuals to a minimum and prefer club role addresses over personal phone numbers; and make sure the site is usable by people with low vision or who navigate by keyboard, which mostly means real text rather than words baked into images, sensible colour contrast and descriptions on photos. Our guide on accessible club websites covers the practical version.

Clubs in Ireland are data controllers in their own right and must handle member information accordingly, and your national governing body's child safeguarding statement will cover photography and the naming of juveniles online. Treat this as general information and confirm the detail with your club children's officer and the Data Protection Commission's guidance for small organisations.

Choosing, in five questions

Answer these honestly at the meeting and the route usually picks itself.

1. Do we have a named, genuinely available volunteer with 40-plus hours between now and the deadline? If not, DIY is a plan to be disappointed in March.
2. Do we have a hard deadline? Registration opening, a season launch, a grant milestone. Deadlines favour a build service, because a supplier has a contract and a volunteer has a job.
3. Can we clear the content decisions in the next fortnight? Fee table, photos, the two hundred words. If not, fix that first — it blocks both routes equally.
4. Who edits it in eighteen months, by name? If the answer is "whoever the secretary is", you need a route that ends with several people able to edit, which rules out any build you cannot take the keys to.
5. Is money or time the scarcer resource? Most community clubs answer "time", and then choose the route that spends it. Be consistent with your own answer.

If you are still weighing the underlying platform rather than the route, how to build a sports club website walks the whole build and how much a club website costs sets out the money side properly.

Getting live without spending a season on it

The reason we built both halves is that committees genuinely split along this line. If you want to drive it yourself, the canvas page editor is designed for a volunteer with an hour on a Tuesday rather than for a designer — sections you drag into place, themes and branding that apply your colours across every page without touching a stylesheet, and your own custom domain on top. If you would rather not, our done-for-you setup does the assembly and hands you a site your committee can actually edit, which is the only kind worth having.

Either way the ending is the same and it is the important part — the club owns the accounts, several people can update the site, and nothing depends on one person staying. Start on the free tier to see the shape of it, check the published pricing when you are ready, and create your club site with whichever route matches the committee you have rather than the one you wish you had.

Frequently asked questions

Should our club build its own website or pay someone?

It depends less on budget than on whether you have a named volunteer with roughly forty to eighty free hours and a deadline they can meet. If you do, build it yourselves and split the pages across three people. If you do not, pay for the setup — but only to someone who hands you a site your committee can edit afterwards without them.

How long does it take to build a club website?

With content ready, a modern club platform gets you live in days to a couple of weeks either way. Without content ready, both routes take months, because the delay is almost never the software — it is the fee table, the photos and the words about who you are. Clear those six decisions first and the build stops being the bottleneck.

What is a done-for-you club website?

A service where somebody else does the setup — platform configuration, design, page assembly, loading your teams and sponsors — using content you supply, then hands the finished site over to your committee. The good ones end with the club owning every account and several people able to edit. The bad ones end with a site only the builder can change.

Will we be stuck with the builder afterwards?

Only if you let the handover be vague. Specify it before you accept the work — accounts in the club's name, the domain registered to the club, at least three committee admin logins, a written note of what is where, and a live demonstration of someone adding a news post. Insist on all of it at handover, because it is much harder to obtain six months later.

What is the biggest risk with a volunteer-built site?

Not quality — most volunteer builds look fine. The risk is single-person dependency. When the site, the logins, the domain and the knowledge all sit with one person, the club loses the whole thing when that person moves on. Three admins, club-owned accounts and a standing agenda item cost nothing and remove almost all of it.

Keep reading — how much does a club website cost puts numbers on both routes, and committee handover checklist makes sure the site survives your next AGM.