A website for an association: what it needs and what it costs
The volunteer secretary who has to choose a site for the club or association needs five pages, a clear budget and a site the next committee can keep up. The whole question, in plain words.
In almost every association the website is one person’s business: the secretary, the treasurer, a devoted parent, a member who “knows a bit about it”. That person eventually leaves, and the site stays. The right choice therefore depends less on how the home page looks than on a simple question: who will be able to keep it up in three years’ time?
The five pages that are enough
A sports club, a music society or a neighbourhood association does not need twenty pages. Five cover almost every real need of the people who visit.
The first is the home page, which says in two sentences what the association does, where and for whom. The second carries the programme: times, classes, season dates, with a note of what has changed. The third introduces the committee and says how to reach it, because a newcomer’s first question is who to talk to. The fourth explains how to become a member, with the fee and the documents to download. The fifth, more discreet, gathers the legal notice and the privacy policy, whose content the Swiss law file recalls.
The rest, the club’s history, the photos of the party or the minutes, can be added later, on demand, without breaking anything.
Who updates when the volunteer leaves
This is the real question, and it is settled before going live. A site that only its creator can edit becomes a risk the moment they leave the committee. The first site we built for someone else, for a skating club and shown in the catalogue, was designed with this in mind: the committee edits the words, the images and the documents itself from an online editor, and the update goes live without going through the workshop.
That means planning two things. The act of updating must be simple enough to be learned in one evening by someone who has never touched a website. And the access details must not be in one person’s name: an email address belonging to the association, a password handed on to the next committee, not the departing volunteer’s personal account.
What pushes the quote up
A presentation site of five to eight pages, with texts you supply, starts at the creation floor price and does not stray far from it. What pushes it up are the additions, because each one has to be built and then maintained: a second language properly written for a club on a language border, appointment or booking, a supplied photo gallery.
For the second language, the article on sites in several languages explains what to plan so that each version can be found. We advise starting with one language, well written, and adding the second when the committee really has someone to keep it up to date.
A realistic budget
The house displays its two floor prices: creation of a site from CHF 2,500, excluding VAT, and maintenance from CHF 1,000 a year, excluding VAT. They are floors, not flat rates: no site is billed for less, and the firm quote starts from there. Once signed, it does not move. The pricing page details what the two amounts include and gives examples.
On top come two costs that are not paid to us, because they go directly to their providers, in the association’s name: the domain name and the hosting, in the order of a few dozen francs a year. They remain the association’s property, which matters the day it changes provider.
For a committee’s budget, the useful question is the cost over five years, not the starting price. A site that is not maintained costs nothing in the first year, then stops working or becomes vulnerable. Maintenance is therefore an item to plan from the start, and it is easier to vote through at the general meeting if it appears in the initial quote.
Handing the site to the next committee
On the day the committee changes, three things must pass from hand to hand: the access details, the domain name, and a page explaining how to update. On that last point a few lines are enough: where to log in, how to edit a text, whom to contact if something goes wrong.
If the former provider no longer replies, or if nobody knows where the site is, taking over a site nobody maintains any more takes several steps, from assessment to switchover without downtime. And if you are unsure what you need, write to us: one conversation is enough to say whether five pages answer your need.
Who writes these notes
This journal is kept by the workshop that designs and maintains the house’s websites. Everything described here, the Search Console, internal links, the business profile, is part of the work delivered with a site: if you would rather someone took care of it, that is precisely the trade.