River Valley Rangers AFC

The club

Rivervalley Rangers AFC has been Swords' community football club since 1981: a youth academy, DDSL boys' and girls' teams from U7 to U17, senior squads, Over 35s, walking football, and inclusive programmes. Hundreds of families interact with the club every week — and the website is where fixtures, news, and club life live.

The work

This is the project that never ships "done":

• Match-day hub — fixtures, results, and club news structured so volunteers can keep it current without a developer.
• Content operations — the real design problem in community sport is who updates the site on a wet Tuesday. Everything is built around making that person's job easy.
• 2026 redesign — a full refresh currently rolling out, carrying years of accumulated content forward onto a cleaner, faster platform.

Under the hood

Next.js with NextAuth for role-based logins, Prisma over Postgres, and Stripe wired in for online fee payment — registrations and subs no longer mean a separate spreadsheet or a bank transfer chased over text. Bulk fixture and squad data comes in via CSV/Excel import rather than hand-entry, and the platform runs campaigns (fundraisers, sign-up pushes) and safeguarding workflows alongside the day-to-day match-day content.

Lessons

Community platforms age in dog years. The technical choices matter less than the operational ones: if updating content requires anyone special, the site is already dying. Design for the volunteer, not the developer.

That kept holding through 2026: the multi-step content form volunteers found fiddly got rebuilt as a 3-step, Instagram-style wizard; a stale frozen league table from the previous season quietly kept showing as "current" until a fix caught it; and a 7.5MB hero video poster nobody had noticed got compressed to 218KB. None of these were architecture problems — they were the platform quietly drifting out of step with how volunteers and visitors actually use it week to week, which is the real maintenance job here.