Macquarie United FC — Football Club Website Redesign, Bathurst NSW
Sector Community Sport · Football
Location Bathurst, NSW
Scope Website design and build (Squarespace) · Full copywriting · E-commerce merch store · Sponsorship page · Navigation and UX design · Mobile-optimised
The brief
Macquarie United Football Club has been Bathurst's home of grassroots football since 1984. Forty years of junior players, senior grades, women's teams, MiniRoos, volunteers, sponsors, and families all united by one club. They deserved a website that actually reflected that.
What they had was a WordPress site that hadn't been meaningfully updated since 2019. Broken placeholder images where merchandise photos should have been. News posts years out of date. A structure that made it genuinely difficult for anyone to find basic information like how to register or when their team played next. It looked like a club that had given up, which couldn't have been further from the truth.
They came to me ready to fix it properly.
The challenge
A community football club website has to work for a lot of different people at once. Parents looking to sign up their kids. Senior players checking draw and registration details. Volunteers wanting to get involved. Sponsors looking for information about partnerships. Each of those people arrives with a different question and needs to find their answer quickly, or they'll give up and call someone.
The old site had no clear pathways for any of them. Everything was buried, the navigation was confusing, and the overall impression was that this was a club running on whatever energy was left at the end of a long weekend of football, not the thriving 300-player, 20-team community it actually is.
The new site needed to feel like the club: welcoming, energetic, a bit no-frills in the best possible way, and easy enough to navigate that nobody has to ring the secretary to find out how to register
What we built
A full Squarespace website designed and built from the ground up, with complete copy written across every page.
The site is structured around the two things a community club website needs to do: get people in the door and keep the members it already has informed and engaged.
The navigation separates clearly into "Play With Us" (Juniors and MiniRoos, Senior Men's, Senior Women's, How to Register, Coaches) and "Get Involved" (Volunteer, Sponsorship, Events, Contact). Every visitor knows immediately where to go based on why they showed up.
The homepage leads with the club's best asset: its community. Real photos, real players, 40 years of history anchored in a single line that captures everything the club stands for. The merch store is integrated directly into the site with a proper e-commerce setup, replacing the broken WooCommerce placeholder images that had been sitting there for years.
The sponsorship page gives current and potential sponsors a professional, clearly structured case for getting involved, complete with naming rights tiers and genuine reach data. The volunteer page does the same for people who want to give their time.
Every word of copy across the entire site was written as part of this project. The club's voice is warm, direct, and community-first. No corporate football club language. No jargon. Just a club that loves what it does and wants more people to come and be part of it.
THE BEFORE
The result
A website Macquarie United can actually use. One that reflects 40 years of community football in Bathurst rather than apologising for itself. The club now has a platform that handles registrations, merch sales, sponsor information, volunteer recruitment, and general information all in one place, with a design that finally matches the energy of the people behind it.
Deliverables: Full Squarespace website design and build · Complete website copywriting · E-commerce merch store setup · Sponsorship page and partnership collateral · Navigation structure and UX · Mobile-optimised design · Acknowledgement of Country