Standish Village Hall is a 700-year-old Grade II listed building at the heart of the village I’m lucky to call home. For years, its online presence was part of a shared website with the parish council. The hall needed its own site that made booking simple and gave the committee a proper home for its records.
Standish Village Hall – Squarespace Website
Client: Standish Village Hall Committee
Industry: Community & Venue Hire
Services: Squarespace Website, Content Structure, Domain & Redirects
GOOGLE REVIEW
‘…A clear and attractive website we can be proud of.…
★★★★★
Alison Widgery, Standish Village Hall Committee
A Project Close to Home
Most of my work comes from businesses across Gloucestershire and Sussex. This one was on my doorstep. The hall is where the village meets for concerts, celebrations, clubs and meetings, and I’ve celebrated family occasions there myself. Being asked to build its website felt like a chance to give something back to the community I live in.
Where It Started
The hall’s information lived on standishvillage.co.uk alongside the parish council and church pages. Over time, booking details, hire charges, minutes and local information had spread across dozens of pages. If you wanted to hire the hall, it wasn’t obvious where to start. The committee wanted a site for the hall alone, built around three jobs:
Make booking straightforward: availability, hire charges, facilities and how to book, all in one place
Show off the building and give visitors a short introduction to Standish and the surrounding area
Act as an archive for committee meetings, AGM minutes and the hall’s key documents
The Website
I built the new site on Squarespace and structured it around the person who wants to hire the hall. Facilities, capacity, access and booking steps are easy to find, and photography of the building carries the story. Behind that sits a document archive the committee can update themselves, so minutes and AGM papers go online without needing me each time.
When Simple Got Complicated
At the start, this looked like a straightforward build. Then we found that nobody could locate access to the domain. That’s a common problem for community groups, where volunteers set up accounts and then move on. It took some patient detective work, but once we recovered access, I could plan a clean handover.
Moving Visitors Across Without Losing Anyone
The old site couldn’t simply be switched off. The parish council still needed it while it moves its content to a new website of its own, which compliance rules require. So I set up redirects on every relevant hall page. Anyone following an old link, bookmark or search result now lands in the right place on the new hall site, while the parish council’s pages stay live until its move is complete.
The Result
The hall now has its own website that’s easy for hirers to use and easy for the committee to keep up to date. The handover also leaves the parish council free to move at its own pace.