A website befitting a hundred-year-old club

The problem

Halifax Imperial Wheelers have been riding together since 1924. Their website said otherwise: it was out of date, nobody used it, and would-be members were emailing to ask whether the club still existed. They had also lost their old domain, and the replacement was one that nobody linked to.

What Lewis designed and Matt built

Lewis designed a new site from the ground up and Matt built it: a warm, confident front door for a club with a century behind it. Strong club branding, an encouraging tone of voice and a mobile-first build make it easy for a curious cyclist to picture themselves on a Thursday ride, then take the first step.

It is a static site with no server to look after. Club officers update events and race results through simple data files, and the site rebuilds itself. And Matt got the club its own address back.

Visit the site

New and existing members buy or renew their membership right from their phone with an integrated Stripe checkout. There is no account to create and no committee member typing payments into a spreadsheet afterwards.

Everything else the club needs to change regularly, events, results, ride times, lives in plain data files that the site builds from, so the officers keep control without needing a developer or a content system to log into.

For years the club’s home was halifax-imps.org.uk. Then a renewal slipped through the cracks, the domain lapsed and was bought up on the open market, and the club found itself on a new .co.uk address it never wanted and didn’t know what to do about.

Matt recovered the original address, cleaned up the search results that had been linking it to the wrong places, and pointed everything back where it belongs. halifax-imps.org.uk is the club’s home again, and every old link and search result now lands where it should.

None of that was in the brief. It just needed doing, so he did it.