Website proposal
A proper publication for Welsh club rugby, where every spotlight has its own page, every club has its own corner, and the people who keep these clubs going can finally answer back.
“The clubs are the heartbeat. Let’s give them somewhere to be heard.”
heartland-heaven.co.ukFirst things first
You have the idea. What you need now is somewhere it can actually live.
A publication about Welsh club rugby, written by someone who goes to the games. Club spotlights, player pathways, match reports from the touchline, and the volunteers who unlock the clubhouse at seven on a Sunday morning. Not a fan forum, and not a news aggregator. A place with a byline and a point of view, where the people it is written about can join in.
Thanks for getting in touch about Heartland Heaven. We read every page of the site before writing any of this, and the thing that stands out is that the plan is already sound. You know who this is for and you know what it should cover. The About page says it plainly: the game at its roots is where the values still show, and hundreds of volunteers keep it standing up.
You already know the site you have now is not the one you want, so we have treated it as a set of notes rather than something to preserve. What it tells us is genuinely useful: the sections are right, the tone is right, and the categories are the ones a reader of this would expect to find. What it cannot do is hold an article. And it cannot do comments or reactions at all, at any price. Those are not settings someone forgot to switch on, they are the ceiling of that kind of tool.
So this proposal is about that ceiling. We would build Heartland Heaven as a real publication: a place where every spotlight, match report and pathway piece is its own page with its own address, where roughly three hundred Welsh clubs each get a page of their own that gathers everything you have ever written about them, and where readers can react and comment underneath, with you in control of what gets published.
There is a legal side to running comments on a UK website, and we have set out exactly how we would keep you on the right side of it. It shapes one design decision, and it is better to make that decision now than to unpick it later.
One more thing worth saying early. The domain, the code and the hosting all end up in your name. If you ever want to take Heartland Heaven somewhere else, you take the whole thing with you and it keeps working.
Your deposit is settled, so there is nothing left to arrange before we start beyond your say-so on what follows.
James Pitt
Founder, Blackoak Creative · Cwm, Blaenau Gwent
Where things stand
We went through heartland-heaven.co.uk page by page on 26 August 2026, mostly to understand the content plan, which is the part worth keeping. Everything below is either something the builder left behind or something that wants taking down this week. None of it is an argument for staying where you are.
The domain was registered on 10 August 2026, so the site is eighteen days old. That is the best possible news. There is no traffic to lose, no rankings to protect and no archive to migrate. Everything below is cheap to fix now and expensive to fix in a year.
The homepage lists twelve headings (Club Spotlights, Player Pathways, History & Heritage, Volunteer Heroes, Women’s Rugby, Local Rivalries and the rest), and every one of them describes an article rather than being one. “In-depth features on individual clubs, their history, and impact” is a promise with nothing behind it. A reader who clicks expecting a spotlight on their club finds another paragraph about spotlights in general.
The contact block at the bottom of the homepage currently reads [[phonenumber]] and [[email]] in plain sight, and “Follow us on social media” sits above no links at all. Anyone who wants to send you a story about their club has no way of doing it.
Three quotes appear on the homepage attributed to three different people, and all three are the identical sentence. The About page still carries [[Name]], Welsh Rugby Enthusiast. These are the builder’s sample text, but as published they read as invented endorsements, which the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 treats as a banned practice. It is a two-minute fix and it should not wait for a rebuild.
Every page loads Google Analytics (G-E6PZPGE4QM), and there is no cookie banner and no privacy policy anywhere on the site. Under UK PECR, analytics cookies need consent before they are set. The fix is either a proper consent banner or cookieless analytics. We would recommend the second, and it has the side benefit of a faster site.
heartland-heaven.co.uk was registered through Webador as reseller on 10 August 2026, points at Openprovider’s nameservers, and currently carries a transfer lock. It works, but it is not really yours yet in the way it should be. Getting it into an account with your name on it is part of this job.
The images on the site come from the builder’s stock library. For a publication whose whole argument is authenticity, that is the weak link, and it is the one thing we cannot make for you. Real photographs from real grounds on wet Saturday afternoons will do more for Heartland Heaven than any design we could draw.
The positioning is right and the structure is close. Club Spotlights, News, Player Pathways, Get Involved and On The Road are the correct sections for this publication, and On The Road in particular is a real editorial idea: a reporter turning up at a ground, watching the game, and talking to the people who have been there forty years. That is the thing nobody else is doing, and it is what we would build the whole site around.
The actual problem
You asked for two things: posts and spotlights you can publish yourself, and a way for the public to comment and react to them. The first is awkward on Webador. The second is not available at any price on any of its plans.
Why this matters more than the design. A website builder is a fine way to put seven pages online, and if Heartland Heaven were only ever going to be seven pages we would tell you to stay put and save your money. But you are describing a publication that grows every week and a community that talks back. That needs a database behind it, and that is the line Webador does not cross.
The proposal
Three parts: somewhere for the writing to live, somewhere for the clubs to live, and somewhere for the readers to join in. Here is the first.
You log in, write the piece, drop the photos in, pick a category, hit publish. It appears on the homepage, in its category, on the club’s own page and in the sitemap, all at once. No page building, no layout decisions, no calling us.
Something like /spotlights/nantyglo-rfc. Which means it can be shared into a club WhatsApp group, posted on a club’s Facebook page, linked to by anyone, and found on Google by someone searching that club’s name. Every article you write becomes a permanent asset.
Club Spotlights, On The Road, Player Pathways, News, Heritage, Volunteer Heroes, Women’s and Girls’, Youth. Each one is a real index page that fills up as you publish, rather than a paragraph describing what it will contain one day.
Upload whatever comes off your phone or camera. The site resizes it, converts it to modern formats, and serves the right size to each device. A gallery on a match report is a few clicks, and it will not slow the page down.
Every article carries the structured data Google uses for news and articles, so your pieces are eligible for the richer results. Titles, descriptions and social preview cards are generated properly, so a link pasted into Facebook looks like something worth clicking.
Pages are served from Cloudflare’s network, which has machines all over the country, so the site is quick on a bad signal in a car park in Bargoed. That matters: a good share of your readers will open you on a phone, standing up, in the ten minutes after a game.
The engine underneath
This is the part that turns Heartland Heaven from a blog into an institution, and it is the single biggest reason to build rather than to keep typing.
We would set up a club list once (name, ground, founded, league, region, colours, crest) and the site would generate a page for every club from it. On that page: everything you have ever written about them, in date order. A spotlight from March, a match report from October, a volunteer profile, a pathway piece about their outside half who has just been picked for the district.
On day one most of those pages are close to empty, and that is fine. They still say the club’s name, their ground, the league they play in, and “we have not been here yet. Tell us about your club”. Which is an invitation, on a page with that club’s name on it, that comes up when someone searches for them.
The bit you asked for
Two levels of taking part, deliberately. One takes a single tap and no details at all. The other takes a name and an email, because saying something in public should carry your name.
Five of them, in plain language rather than emoji soup: Well played, Love this, Respect, Legend and Brings it back. There is no account to make and no email to hand over. The count updates instantly, and the same person cannot inflate it by refreshing the page. This is how most people will take part, and it is the number that tells you which stories landed.
Someone types their name, their email and what they want to say. No account to create and no password to forget, which matters when a good share of your readers are club stalwarts in their sixties and seventies. Their first comment waits for you to approve it. After that they post straight through, unless you say otherwise.
Spotlight page with the community layer · illustration
Heartland HeavenNantyglo RFC have outlasted two world wars, a pit closure and the loss of their first clubhouse to a fire. On a wet Saturday in the valley, the people who kept it going explain how.
The ground sits in the shadow of the mountain, and on a good day you can see three valleys from the far touchline. On a day like this one you can barely see the far touchline. It has not stopped anyone turning up.
Ivor has been unlocking the clubhouse at half seven on a Sunday for the best part of thirty years. He does not remember volunteering for it, exactly. Somebody had a key, then somebody did not, and then he did.
Sample content, deliberately. The club, the people and the comments above are made up for this drawing, and we have said so plainly rather than dressing them up as real quotes. Given what is currently on your homepage, that felt like the right way round.
Staying in control
Grassroots rugby is a small world and people know each other. Most of what comes in will be warm. The tools below are for the handful of times it is not, and for the referee who has just had a bad afternoon.
Your moderation queue · illustration
Nobody’s first comment appears without you approving it. Once you have approved someone, you can trust them and their later comments go straight up. If they let you down, one click takes that trust away again.
A word list you control, plus automatic holds for links, for anything naming a match official, and for anything that looks like it names a junior player. Held, not deleted, so you always get the final say.
Any reader can flag something. Two reports and it hides itself pending your review, so a problem at eleven at night does not sit there until morning. You get one digest email a day, not a notification every time somebody types.
A short page in your own words about what is welcome and what is not. Clubs, players and referees treated decently; no abuse, no settling scores from the pitch. Having it written down makes moderating easy, because you can point at it.
Per article, or automatically after a set number of weeks. Some pieces will not want a comment section at all (an obituary of a club stalwart, for example), and that is a switch you flick when you publish.
If it grows beyond you, extra moderator logins cost nothing and can be added later. Approving comments does not require access to anything else.
Worth reading properly
Since the Online Safety Act 2023 came into force, websites that let users talk to each other carry real duties: risk assessments, records, and Ofcom on the other end of it. That is a heavy load for a one-person publication about club rugby. There is a way to stay out of it, and it depends on a design decision we would make at the start.
Schedule 1, paragraph 4 of the Act exempts a service where the only thing users can do is comment on, react to or rate content published by the provider. Comments and your five reactions sit squarely inside that.
Your Get Involved page invites people to send in stories, photographs and nominations. If those went live as reader posts, Heartland Heaven becomes a user-to-user service and the full duties land on you.
Submissions land in your queue, not on the site. You read, edit and publish them under the Heartland Heaven byline, crediting the sender. Same warmth, same content, and the exemption holds.
To be clear about what this is. We are a web agency, not solicitors, and this is not legal advice. It is simply how we would build the site so the question never arises. If you want it checked by someone qualified before you approve this, we would encourage that, and we will happily talk them through the design.
We would use cookieless, privacy-first analytics instead of Google Analytics. You still see visitors, pages, referrers and which stories are being read; nobody is tracked across the internet, no consent banner is needed, and the site loads faster. If you would rather keep Google Analytics, we will build a proper consent banner instead. It is your call and we will make it work either way.
A name and an email address is personal data, so the site needs a privacy notice that actually describes what happens to it, a route for someone to have their comment removed, and sensible retention. We write all of that and it ships with the site.
Youth rugby means photographs of under-18s. We would set up a short, plain policy for consent and for taking a picture down quickly when a parent asks, plus a rule about not naming junior players in comments, enforced by the automatic hold. Clubs will ask you about this, and having an answer ready builds trust fast.
Built to WCAG 2.2 AA: readable at a distance, usable with a keyboard, sensible with a screen reader, and colour contrast that works in bright sun on a touchline. This is the right thing to do and it also happens to be what a lot of your readers need.
What it would look like
Newspaper logic. The lead story gets the space, the rest is ordered by how recent and how good it is, and there is always something to read. Nothing on the homepage describes a section. Everything on it is a story.
Homepage · desktop
Heartland HeavenNantyglo RFC have outlasted two world wars, a pit closure and the loss of their first clubhouse to a fire. The people who kept it going explain how.
Founded 1901. Playing out of Roundhouse Park in the top of the Ebbw Fach valley, in Division 2 East.
On a phone
HeartlandThe ground sits in the shadow of the mountain, and on a good day you can see three valleys from the far touchline. On a day like this one you can barely see the far touchline.
Design language
The current site uses the builder’s defaults, Merriweather over Lato, which is perfectly fine and belongs to about a million other websites. A publication needs headlines with some muscle and body text you can read for eight minutes without noticing it.
The ground sits in the shadow of the mountain, and on a good day you can see three valleys from the far touchline. On a day like this one you can barely see the far touchline.
The ground sits in the shadow of the mountain, and on a good day you can see three valleys from the far touchline. On a day like this one you can barely see the far touchline.
Headlines and labels in Archivo · article text in Source Serif 4
Archivo was drawn for headlines and high-impact print, and it is about the closest thing on the web to the lettering already curved around your badge. Source Serif is a screen serif with a big, open lower case, built for reading rather than for looking at. Together they read as a newspaper without pretending to be an old one.
Derby day at the top of the valley
Headlines in Bitter · article text in Inter
A slab serif with a club-programme warmth to it, over the cleanest sans on the web. Friendlier and less shouty than the pick, but the headlines carry less weight at large sizes.
Derby day at the top of the valley
Headlines in Newsreader · article text in Public Sans
Quieter and more literary, closer to a long-read magazine than a sports paper. Lovely for the heritage pieces, a little polite for a derby report.
Derby day at the top of the valley
Design language
We sampled the four colours straight out of your logo rather than inventing new ones. Black, that sky blue, the brick red of the inner ring, and white. A site built from those will look like it belongs to the badge, which is the whole job of a palette.
Your badge already knows this: the blue wordmark sits on the black ring, not on the white. We follow the same rule. Sky blue goes on black, or it goes underneath dark text as a block. That is where it looks best anyway.
It measures about 2.3 to 1 against paper, which fails accessibility standards and is genuinely hard to read outdoors on a phone. When blue has to be text, we use the deeper version of it.
A club page can carry that club’s own colours as a stripe across the top, pulled from the club list. It makes three hundred pages feel individual without needing three hundred designs, and clubs love seeing their own colours.
Not one. If there is no real photograph for a piece we use a coloured block with the club’s name set in type, which looks deliberate rather than borrowed. Generic rugby stock undoes the whole argument of the site.
The plan on a page
Your seven pages become five fixed pages plus three systems that grow on their own every time you publish.
All of these are easier once the site exists and you know what your readers actually use. The build is structured so none of them means starting again.
Being found
The WRU covers the community game officially, and the papers cover it when something goes wrong. Between the two there is an enormous gap, and it is made of club names.
| What someone types | What Heartland Heaven has for them |
|---|---|
| A club’s name, on its own | That club’s page: ground, founded, league, colours, and every story you have written about them. Most clubs have nothing better than a Facebook page, so this is winnable almost immediately./clubs/nantyglo-rfc |
| “rugby clubs in Blaenau Gwent”, “clubs in the Ebbw Fach valley” | Region and league index pages built from the same club list, each linking down to the clubs in it./clubs/blaenau-gwent |
| A player’s name, after they get picked up | Your pathway piece from two years earlier, when nobody else was writing about them. This is the compounding asset, because you were there first. |
| “grassroots rugby wales”, “welsh club rugby” | The homepage and section indexes. Harder and slower, and honestly it is not where the wins are. The club pages are. |
| Someone asking an AI chatbot about a Welsh club | An llms.txt file and clean structured data, so the models can read the site properly and cite it. Free to do while building, awkward to retrofit. |
No lock-in
You have already learned what it feels like to have your website live inside somebody else’s product. We build so that never happens again, and we would rather be kept because you want to be than because you cannot leave.
We move heartland-heaven.co.uk to a registrar account in your name, with the login in your hands. That means clearing the transfer lock it currently carries and changing the IPS tag. We handle that, and the account it lands in is yours.
Every file of the site sits in a GitHub account in your name. No licensed theme with a renewal date, no page-builder format only one tool can open. Any competent developer could pick it up on day one.
Cloudflare Pages in your own account, with us added as a collaborator you can remove with two clicks. Your articles and comments live in a database on your own account too, and we can hand you an export of the lot at any time.
Where everything lives, how to publish a piece, how to add a club, how to moderate, who to contact for what. Plain English, and yours whether or not you stay with us afterwards.
We take a copy of everything on the current site before anything changes, so the words and the pictures are safely yours whatever happens next. Nothing is switched off until the new site is live, checked and signed off by you. And if you want the two placeholder tokens and the duplicated testimonials taken down this week, before any of this starts, say the word and we will sort it. That is not something we would charge for.
How the project runs
Longer than a brochure site because there is a database, an admin area and a community layer in it. Every step that needs you is scheduled rather than sprung on you.
A call to agree the sections, the reaction wording and the house rules in your voice. We start the domain move out of Webador, and we build the club list (name, ground, founded, league, region, colours), which is the single most valuable asset in the whole project.
Homepage, an article page with the community layer, and a club page, designed as real pages in a browser rather than flat pictures. Two rounds of changes are built into this. Your badge stays exactly as it is and the palette comes out of it, so there is no rebrand to sit through.
Article system, all eight sections, the club directory and its three hundred pages, search, images, structured data, redirects from your current addresses, and the admin area you write in. By the end of this you can publish unaided.
Reactions, comments, replies, the report link, the automatic holds, your moderation queue, the daily digest, and the submissions inbox behind Get Involved. Then we try to break it, because a comment box is the part of any website people probe first.
We move your existing pages across and help you get your first handful of real articles up, so the site does not launch empty. A private preview link to share with as many club people as you like. We test on real phones, run accessibility checks against WCAG 2.2 AA, and clear the snag list.
The site goes live, old addresses redirect, Search Console gets pointed at the new sitemap. We walk you through publishing an article, adding a club and moderating a comment, on a call we record for you. Then we watch it closely for a fortnight while the first real comments arrive.
Your current site stays exactly as it is, live and working, until you have signed the new one off.
Next steps
You have already done the first part. The rest looks like this, so nothing lands on you as a surprise later. The figures are in the quote that came with this document.
Paid, and thank you. It covered the read of your current site, the thinking in this document and the page designs in it, and it holds your place in the diary.
When you are happy with this proposal, the rest of the invoice falls due and development starts. Everything in this document is covered by it: design, build, the club directory, the community layer, launch and your training.
Starts the day the site is live and signed off, never while we are still building. Hosting, updates, backups, monitoring and us on the end of an email when something needs a hand.
If anything here is wrong, or there is something you wanted that we have missed, say so before you approve it. Changing a proposal costs nothing and changing a built website costs a fortnight. If it is right as it stands, approve it and we will book your kick-off call for the same week.