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· 3 min read

Your running site, start to finish: a checklist

Nineteen things to sort, in order, from hosting to the day you tell the club.

This is the list I work through when I set up a club or race site with one of the kits. It’s in order. Some items take two minutes, and one of them (email) can eat an afternoon if your host is awkward, so start that one early.

Where an item only applies to one kit, it says so. Everything else is both.

Before you start

  • A domain, or a subdomain of one you already have. clubs.yourclub.org costs nothing extra if the club already owns yourclub.org.
  • Hosting that runs WordPress 6.5 or later on PHP 8.0 or later. I’ve written up the two hosts I use.
  • An email address the site can send from, and SMTP set up so sign-up and password emails don’t land in spam. On clubs.racerpacer.com that’s Gravity SMTP sending through Google Workspace.
  • Event kit only: an ACF Pro licence. The free version of ACF won’t do.
  • Your logo as a PNG or JPG, at least 512px square. SVG isn’t accepted, on purpose.

Install

  • Install WordPress. Set the site title, the timezone (so meet-up times and race dates are right), and permalinks to “Post name”.
  • Upload and activate the theme, then the plugin or plugins. The club kit and event kit pages say which is which.
  • Club kit: go to Clubs → Settings and press Create pages. That makes the join, my club, browse, report, terms and privacy pages.
  • Event kit: load the demo calendar, or add your first event by hand. The demo is quicker to learn from.
  • Set a Site Icon in Appearance → Customize → Site Identity. It’s the little picture in the browser tab.

Make it yours

  • Replace the logos in the theme’s assets/img/ folder. The bundled ones are RacerPacer’s and Wildstride’s.
  • Club kit: set the notification email, decide whether routes are on, and whether the directory (the list on the home page and at /browse/) shows.
  • Read the terms and privacy pages properly and change them to fit. They’re a starting draft, not legal advice.
  • Decide on analytics. Cloudflare Web Analytics sets no cookies and needs no banner. Google Analytics needs the cookie plugin and a banner.

Before you tell anyone

  • Sign up as a test club, or add a test event, and read every email it sends. Check the spam folder too.
  • Upload a GPX route and a logo from a phone, not just a laptop. Most of your club will do it on a phone.
  • Look at the pages on a phone at 360px wide. Nothing should need a sideways scroll.
  • Turn off “coming soon” or maintenance mode, and clear the host’s cache.
  • Delete the test club and any demo content you don’t want Google to find.

That’s nineteen. When they’re all ticked, tell the club.