I’ve been running with Club Citius in Victoriaville for a couple of years now. I’ve also helped with the club’s administration and recently became president of its board. Updating our website had been on my mind for a while.
What the site needed to do
The site mainly needed to help people learn about the club, find training information, and decide whether to join. We barely used the WordPress blog. After dealing with malware and looking at the cost of renewing our hosting, I chose to rebuild it as a static site.
I kept the old articles and their existing URLs so the club’s history would remain accessible. Registration remains on AthleticsReg, as required for the club’s affiliation with Québec’s athletics federation.
Before and after
Before
WordPress on Bluehost
A CMS with a theme and plugins to maintain.
Hosting
$539.64
Previous 3-year plan · USD
PageSpeed · Mobile
After
Astro on Cloudflare Pages
A static site, with no CMS or plugin updates.
Hosting
$0
Covered by the free tier.
PageSpeed · Mobile
Finding the right design
I first asked the AI to build the website directly. The other club administrators thought the result was decent, but I was disappointed with the design. It felt generic and didn’t really capture the club’s personality.
I then tried generating a design as an image first. That gave me more original layouts to work with. After a few iterations, including replacing invented slogans with the club’s own wording, I asked the AI to implement the mockup. This got much closer to what I had in mind.
