The five pages every non-league club website gets wrong

Clubhouse table with laptop and tea, football pitch through the window

A club website has one job: answer the questions people actually arrive with. What time's kick-off? Where's the ground? How do my kid's team sign up? Who do I email about sponsorship? Most non-league club sites fail at least three of those — not because volunteers don't care, but because nobody's looked at the site through a visitor's eyes since it was built.

Here are the five pages that go wrong most often, and the fix for each. None of them takes more than an evening.

1. The fixtures page that's out of date

The most-visited page on any club site, and the most commonly stale. A fixtures page that still shows last month's games tells every visitor the whole site can't be trusted. The fix isn't discipline — volunteers have jobs — it's automation: use a site that pulls fixtures, results and tables from your league's data automatically, so the page updates itself when the league does. That's precisely what a LeaguePages club website does, free.

2. The contact page that goes nowhere

A generic contact form that emails an inbox nobody checks is worse than no form at all — the sponsor who filled it in thinks you ignored them. Put named roles with real addresses on the page: chairman, secretary, junior co-ordinator, sponsorship. If a person leaves the role, updating one line is a two-minute job. And put the sponsorship contact first — that's the email that pays for the kit.

3. The directions page that assumes everyone's been before

"The ground is on Mill Lane" is not directions. Away fans, referees, first-time parents and groundhoppers all need the same four things: the full postcode that actually works in a sat-nav (many grounds have a postcode that lands you in a field — say so and give the working one), where to park, which gate to use, and what it costs on the door — card or cash. One honest paragraph beats an embedded map with no context.

4. The junior section that hides the sign-up

For most clubs, the junior section is the future of the club and the biggest source of new families. The question every parent arrives with is "how does my child join?" — and on most sites the answer is buried, out of date, or missing. Put a "Join us" block at the top of the juniors page: age groups, training night, cost, and the co-ordinator's contact. Measure the difference in enquiries within a month.

5. The homepage that's a museum

If the lead story on your homepage is from February, the message is "nothing happens here." The fix is to make the homepage mostly self-updating: latest result, next fixture, league position — all drawn from live data — with one editable news slot for the things only humans can write. Volunteers then only touch the site when there's genuinely something to say.

The pattern in all five

Every one of these failures has the same root cause: the site depends on a volunteer remembering to update it. The clubs whose websites work have flipped the model — the data pages update themselves, and human effort is saved for the human stories. That's the entire design philosophy behind LeaguePages club sites: fixtures, results, tables and club pages update automatically from league data, forever, for free. See how it works.

Up the volunteers. Non-league — making the difference.