Rebuilding my club's website: from WordPress to Statamic

I practise Wing Chun, and I love this martial art.

But for a while now, one thing kept disturbing my inner peace.

No, not a badly placed punch during Chi Sao.

It was my club's website.

An old WordPress that had lived through several generations of browsers, was a few updates behind, and even had a critical security vulnerability.

Thankfully, it was never exploited.

Either we were very lucky, or hackers opened the code and thought:

"Honestly, no. I don't have the energy."

A simple mission: refresh the design a bit

One day, a perfectly reasonable idea comes to me:

I'll just modernise the design of the site.

No question of rebuilding everything.

A few more current colours, a better layout, two or three adjustments… a quick little intervention.

The kind of task you calmly wrap up over a couple of evenings.

Well - that's what I thought before reopening WordPress.

First fight: WordPress

I put together a new design, and then comes the moment to integrate it.

And there it is: the wall.

Creating a design isn't really a problem for me. But building a clean WordPress theme, modifying an existing one, or trying to work out why this piece of content lives in a page, that one in an option, and the rest directly in the code…

Let's say it is clearly not my home turf.

I find myself navigating between PHP files, page templates, plugins, WordPress settings, and an entire framework used by the theme.

A sort of technical kata whose movements nobody ever taught me.

Still, one thing leading to another, I get the new design working.

The result isn't bad.

The site is more modern, more readable, and visually far more pleasant.

But something bothers me.

A simple brochure site, needlessly complicated

For a site whose job is essentially to present the club, show the class schedule and let visitors get in touch, I end up with a surprisingly complex architecture.

Some text sits directly in the code.

Other bits are stored in the WordPress configuration.

Others still are editable from the admin panel.

And to change certain visual elements, you need to understand how the theme's framework works from end to end.

In short: to change one sentence and move a button, you almost had to start with a three-day training course.

The site worked, but I wasn't satisfied.

And when a developer says they are "not entirely satisfied", we generally know how this ends.

Badly.

Or in a complete rebuild.

Often both.

Is there really nothing besides WordPress?

So I asked myself a question:

For a brochure site with a few articles, do I really need WordPress?

I wanted something simpler.

A tool that would let me keep control of the design and the code, while still giving my Sifu a real admin interface.

I wanted to avoid a heavy database, a pile of plugins, and a system wildly out of proportion with the club's actual needs.

That's when I rediscover Statamic.

I already knew the name, but I had never really taken the time to work with it.

So I start experimenting.

I write a bit of code.

I learn how it works.

I test the content management.

And then it clicks.

Markdown articles and no mandatory database

With Statamic, articles can be written in Markdown.

Content is stored in files.

For a project this size, you don't even need a database.

The content can be versioned along with the rest of the code, while staying editable from a genuine admin interface.

And at that point I thought:

This thing is great!

I finally had a solution that matched my need exactly.

The freedom to build the site the way I wanted, without forcing my Sifu to edit files or understand how Git works.

For him, everything stays reachable from a familiar admin panel.

For me, the project stays clean, readable and easy to maintain.

Everybody wins.

Well - mostly me, because I had just officially found a good reason to start over.

A few extra changes…

So I start porting the new design into Statamic.

Then I build the various pages of the site.

Then the class descriptions.

Then the schedule.

Then the blog posts.

Then the contact form.

Then a few components to make editing the content easier.

Then two or three more improvements that were absolutely not part of the original plan.

At this stage, the small visual refresh had officially turned into a full replacement of the site and its content management system.

A classic.

A new site for my Sifu

Today, my Sifu finally has a modern website worthy of the name.

He can edit the copy, the schedule, the club information and the blog posts himself, from a simple interface.

The site also has a real contact form and a clearer structure for visitors who want to discover Wing Chun or come and try a class.

On my side, I now have a project that is far more pleasant to evolve.

The content is no longer scattered between the code, the plugins and various configuration screens.

Everything is organised, versionable, and sized for what the club actually needs.

The developer's disease

At the start, I only wanted to change the design of an old WordPress site.

By the end, I had replaced the theme, the CMS and pretty much everything else.

I think there is a disease specific to developers.

We look at something that works more or less correctly and immediately think:

I could totally rebuild this more cleanly.

Sometimes we should probably learn to just change the button colour and move on.

But let's be honest.

That would be a lot less fun.

And in this particular case, rebuilding the whole site was probably the right call.

Well… that's what I'm going to keep telling myself, anyway.