Building a Charity Site Non-Developers Can Actually Maintain
F.O.G. Canada (Friends of Golf) raises money for community causes through an annual golf tournament. The brief was simple: ship a site the team can edit themselves between cycles. WordPress + Elementor, tuned for non-developers, with sponsorship tiers as drag-and-drop modules.
When a small charity asks for a website, the temptation is to ship the stack you're proudest of. The right move is the opposite — pick the stack the team can keep running after you stop being on call. For Fog of War Canada, that meant WordPress and Elementor, not Next.js.
The mission shapes the architecture
F.O.G. Canada — Friends of Golf — is a charity built around an annual golf tournament. The tournament is the year's anchor fundraiser, with sponsorship tiers, registrations, donations, and a sponsor wall that grows from cycle to cycle. The team is volunteers — passionate, but not technical. The site needs to be editable by someone who has never opened a code editor.
What the build prioritized
- Drag-and-drop section templates the team can clone for new tournament cycles.
- A sponsorship-tier component (Title, Eagle, Birdie, etc.) that surfaces logos at the right scale without needing CSS edits.
- Mobile-first layouts because attendees RSVP and donate from the green, not a desktop.
- Lightweight SEO — clean URLs, real meta descriptions, OG cards — so donations don't depend on whoever shared the link.
The ongoing part
I've been on this project since 2024. Each cycle brings new sponsors, new event photography, accessibility passes as the audience grows, and the kind of small perf tuning that adds up over years. The lesson I keep relearning here: the right project for a charity is rarely the most technically interesting one. It's the one that still works in three years when the volunteer who took over has never met you.