What an angling club website actually needs
Six things an angling club website needs, three that waste everyone's time, and why the join and permit buttons matter more than the design.
By Alex Baker, Tadpole
Most Irish angling clubs have no website. Of the ones that do, a good share stopped being updated years ago and still list a secretary who stood down in 2019. Ours was one of those. It was built by a member who knew how, and when he moved away it froze at the moment he left.
This is what we learned rebuilding it, written so that it is useful even if your club never uses anything of ours.
The six things a stranger asks
A club website has one reader who matters, and it is not the members. Members know where the water is. The reader is a stranger: an angler who has moved to the area, someone who fished the river as a child and wants to come back, a visitor looking for a day's fishing. They arrive with six questions, and a site that answers all six is doing its job.
Who you are. The club's name, the county, a sentence about the waters, and a crest if you have one. Not a history, just enough to know they have the right place.
Which waters you control, and the rules. The stretches or the lough, what can be fished, bag limits, catch-and-release, where the car park is. This is the page that gets read on a phone in the car park, so it wants to be short and correct.
When the season opens and closes. Dates. Not "see the notice board".
How to join. A form that reaches a person who will answer, and a sentence on what happens next. If applications go to a committee, say so and say roughly how long it takes.
How to buy a day permit. The single most valuable button on the site, because it is the one that brings money in from people who are not members. If permits are sold in a shop, say which shop and when it is open.
One contact that gets read. An email address that a named officer actually checks. Not a form that goes to an inbox nobody has opened since the last AGM.
The three things that waste everyone's time
A news page nobody updates. A site whose latest news is from 2021 tells a stranger the club is dead. If nobody on the committee will post a catch report or an AGM notice, leave the page out. Silence is better than a date.
A forum. Nobody moderates it, and it fills with spam or arguments. The club's Facebook page or the notice board at the water already does this job.
A contact form to nowhere. See above. The form is only as good as the person behind it.
Why ours went stale, and why it stopped
The honest reason most club sites die is that the person who built them leaves. Everything on the site was typed in by hand, so every change needed that one person.
The fix was not a better website builder. It was making the site read from the records the secretary already keeps. The officers on our site are the officers in the membership system this year. The season dates are the ones the permit shop uses. When the secretary updates a rule on a water, the site changes with it, because it is the same record.
That is the difference between a site that is current and a site that was current once.
The buttons matter more than the design
A club site can look like anything. What decides whether it is worth having is whether the join button and the permit button are wired to something. On our old site the join button emailed a form to somebody's inbox, and somebody copied the names into a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet was the one that was always slightly wrong.
Now the join button is the application form the committee reviews, and the permit button is the permit shop. Nobody copies anything. The website is the front door to the same system the club runs on.
Your domain should be yours
One thing to insist on, whoever builds your site: the club should buy and own its own domain, in the club's name, as a direct cost. Most providers do the opposite and register it themselves, which is fine until the day the club wants to move and finds it does not own its own address. We will act as agent if a club would rather not deal with a registrar, but the name is the club's.
Where we ended up
A Tadpole plan includes a club website, whichever plan the club is on. It has the six things above and not the three, it is kept current by the secretary's own records, and the join and permit buttons are wired in. Four of the five clubs on Tadpole today have one; the fifth already had its own site. If you build your own instead, the list above still holds, and we would rather you had a good site than no site.
We built Tadpole for our own club and other clubs asked for it. Five Irish clubs run on it today for renewals, membership records and day permits, with four more onboarding.