Website for a rowing club
Sudbury Rowing Club is a modest rowing club in a bucolic Suffolk market town. It’s volunteer-run and, like many amateur sports clubs, needs a constant stream of new members.
Since the mid-nineteenth century it’s held annual regattas (dubbed ‘Little Henley’ and renowned in appropriate circles) on its work-of-Constable water meadows, which attract far-flung competitors and spectators and are pretty important.
Online early, the club has more than 25 years of news archives and old information.
What I did
Marketing
This is a marketing site.
I built clear routes for users who’re contemplating joining the club. There’s a persistent, ‘join’ route:
- a lot of calls-to-actions
- a mega-sub-landing page that triages users and slims down a mountain of content to the that’s relevant to each user
- a set of neat forms that reduce friction for potential members but send to appropriate club volunteers and reduce internal admin
The club’s regatta needed separate treatment. The existing dodgy marketing/essential-safety-info page had evolved into a crackingly effective WYSIWYG tour-de-force. It had enough traffic that Google seemed to have done the AI schema thing, and cleverly extracted important info hidden in <em> tags.
I turned this successful part of the site into a richer single-page jobbie that respected popular URLs like /regatta/course-plan and /regatta/results but would drop users into a tabbed section of a self-contained regatta page.
A place of record
This site should be the place-of-record for certain datasets.
It wasn’t part of the brief, but I thought it would be useful to build a neat single-page representation of the club’s governance. I built that: a simple, static statement of all the executive and non-executive club officers, with role descriptions drawn from the club’s constitution.
But more fun is possible. We inherited more than a decade of Wordpress page updates to the list of committee members. Add some research, and we can provide several decades of archival data.
Redesigns for the digital world
The club’s crest is great, but the exisiting digitisation – a raster scan of a watercolour-tinted ink sketch – didn’t really do it justice.
This is a subtle redrawing of the the club crest. It’s not intended as a redesign – ideally no one notices the change – but it’s gently optimised for clarity, versatility and performance.