Hi all,
I am looking for some advice on how to architect a particular setup. Whilst it's not a startup I'm keen to hear how you might approach the problem.
I am volunteering to look after the tech systems for an amateur sports club. A few years ago, I built the current system; the management overhead is increasing, making me rethink the setup.
I'd be immensely grateful to hear how you'd all approach this particular problem.
The Ask: We have around 120 members each year who pay a membership fee of ~£200-300 a year. They have the option to pay for this upfront or in monthly payments. There are also a few variants to this, such as a discounted rate for new members.
In addition to the membership payments, we occasionally have additional products such as social events/dinners. Ideally, I'd like the club admins to be able to create these new products themselves.
When a member registers, we need to collect some information from them (emergency contact etc); this needs to be searchable by club admins. The admins also need to be able to send out emails to different lists of members.
Finally, we need a public-facing website that advertises the club and provides information to prospective members and helps with SEO.
Money is reasonably tight, so % transaction fee or high monthly SaaS fees needs strong justification.
Current Situation: I built the current system two years ago. It centres around a self-hosted WordPress running on EC2. It has a theme (Arvada) and a bunch of plugins for handling membership payments (I didn't go down the woocommerce route). I found many of the payment/e-commerce/membership plugins were expensive and bloated for what we needed. I ended up going with WP Membership which seemed cheap and straightforward.
We use stripe as a processor, and it also acts as our general reporting tool for purchases/customers etc.
I've set up Hubspot CRM and manually populated it with member data. It quickly became out of date and isn't trusted. We still use it for sending emails.
After two years, the current setup is requiring more and more effort to maintain. The current WordPress site is very slow to load for users, and some pages aren't working on mobile (hurting SEO). The admin panel is painfully slow; edits are almost impossible.
Ideas: - The public site is pretty much static. I like the idea of a static site deployed to something like Netlify. - A static public site would leave a pretty simple e-commerce site with minimal branding requirements but needs to handle subscription products and ideally a customer portal to update their data/see purchases. - If WordPress is the right direction, maybe a hosted version helps with the performance and management issues? - Maybe a low-code platform could help build something custom quickly?
Anyway, keen to hear what all you intelligent people think about this. All advice welcome.
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