Case study
Stocksbridge Golf Club
A slow, generic WordPress site replaced with a website built for this club, and a system behind it that anyone here can actually use.
- Client
- Stocksbridge Golf Club
- Where
- Deepcar, Sheffield
- Work
- Website rebuild & custom CMS
- Year
- 2026
The problem
A website
nobody could touch.
The club was running an off-the-shelf WordPress theme. It was slow, it looked rough on a phone, and it had been built to suit everybody, which in practice meant it suited nobody in particular. A golf club with one of the best views in Sheffield had a website that could have belonged to a plumber, a dentist or a dog groomer.
The bigger problem was who could change it. Updating the simplest thing, a competition date or a note about the course being wet, meant working through a back end stuffed with hundreds of settings that had nothing to do with running a golf club. So it did not get done. Information went stale, and anything urgent meant finding someone technical and hoping they were free.
The solution
Built for this club,
not for everyone.
I replaced the whole thing with a website built from scratch for Stocksbridge. Nearly everyone looking up a golf club is doing it on a phone, often stood in a car park deciding whether to play, so that is the screen it was designed on first and the desktop version followed. It loads quickly, it works on whatever someone happens to be holding, and the photography of the course finally gets the room it deserves.
The things people came for stopped being buried. Booking a tee time, green fees, visitor information, membership and how the course is playing today are all a tap from the front page, rather than three menus deep.
Behind the scenes
Edit the page
by clicking on it.
The front end is only half of it. Handing the club another general-purpose admin panel would have recreated the original problem, so I built them their own. To change something, you open the page and click the words you want to change. There is no separate editor to learn, and no guessing which setting on which screen controls which part of the site.
Anything that appears in more than one place, the green fees, the opening hours, the course status, is written once and updates everywhere it is used. Nothing goes live until someone presses publish. There are no themes to choose, no plugins to update, and no settings that can quietly break the website.
Photographs work the same way. Every image sits in one place, and each one tells you where it is being used, so nobody has to worry that deleting a picture will leave a hole on the membership page.
The result
A website the club
runs itself.
Stocksbridge now has a site that looks like the club it represents, works properly on the phone nearly everyone uses to find it, and stays current because keeping it current no longer requires a developer.
Updated in minutes
A green fee, the course status, a fresh set of photographs. Changed by whoever is in the clubhouse, without ringing anyone.
Built for phones first
Most people checking a golf club are stood outside on a phone. That is the screen the site was designed on.
Looks like the club
Not a theme with the logo dropped in. The design was drawn around this course and these photographs.
No technical knowledge needed
If you can fill in a form, you can run the website. Nobody at the club had to learn anything.