Swords Village
A sourced guide to Swords, Co. Dublin — its history, what Fingal is building, MetroLink, events, the clubs and community groups, the place guides and a directory of 1,580 local businesses. It absorbed the Fosterstown site.
Key Features & Outcomes
- Started as a fork of the Fosterstown site and ended as its replacement: the plans, clubs and directory were about the whole of Swords, so the two sites were merged into one under its own domain. Every old Fosterstown address and both demo links answer with a permanent redirect to the matching page, each checked against the live site
- One site, one database: the business directory, contact messages and opt-in list live in a single Cloudflare D1 database. The two old databases were compared table by table before the merge and matched row for row, so nothing needed reconciling
- Every history, plans and events claim carries an Established, Probable or Still to establish label, a named source and a date last checked, so a local tradition sits apart from a dated record
- A MetroLink page for the four Swords stations that says what has been approved, what is only expected, and lists what is not yet known, including the opening date
- Photographs are open-licence and credited in the hero caption; generated images are captioned as illustrative, and nothing is shown as a photograph that is not one
- Cookieless analytics with no consent banner, and email sent through the studio's own verified domain rather than a new one
The idea
Fosterstown began as a guide to one townland on the south-west edge of Swords. It quietly became something wider: the plans for the town, the sports clubs, the community groups and a directory of every business in Swords are not about Fosterstown at all. It first got a sister site under the studio's own domain, then the founder registered swordsvillage.ie and the two became one: Fosterstown is now a section of a town-wide site, with room to grow past history.
The build
The Swords site started as a fork of the Fosterstown codebase, trimmed to the
pages it needed and given a new theme: navy and stone with a sea-blue accent,
built around a round-tower mark. The Fosterstown pages (the place guides, the
townland map, the MetroLink-at-Fosterstown page and its history) were then
brought back in under /fosterstown/ and /places/, and the two unlisted demo
pages moved under /demos/.
Pages are static; a small Worker handles the contact form and a private work queue. The history, plans, events, MetroLink, clubs and community pages are written from named public sources, each marked with how sure we are and when it was last checked.
Why it matters
The work that took the most care was the moves, not the new pages. Old addresses had to keep working, search engines had to be told the pages had moved, and a new Worker, database and bucket had to take over without losing a secret or a row. The check that mattered was against the live site: every redirect, at the exact address, returning the right page.