Ashton Open Gardens

Ashton under Hill has opened its gardens to visitors for nearly fifty years. The website had not kept pace. It was a set of hand-written HTML pages from the era of table layouts and bevelled buttons, and changing a single line meant editing the markup and uploading files by FTP — so in practice nobody did. By the time I was asked to look at it, the home page was still advertising a weekend that had been and gone.

On a phone it was the desktop page shrunk to fit. For an event that draws visitors from well outside the village, the website was the first impression and it was not helping.

I rebuilt the site from scratch in WordPress, ready for launch the following summer. The brief was not to reinvent it: the same pages, the same information, the same job. What needed to change was how it looked and who could maintain it.

The sage green the village already used stayed, but I rebuilt the palette around it — green as the accent against white, rather than every page sitting on a block of it — and set the text in a serif that suits a Cotswold garden event rather better than Calibri did. The photographs, which were always the best thing about the site, got room to breathe.

It is deliberately ordinary WordPress. Every page can be edited by a committee member through the admin, with no HTML involved. The gallery is a plugin the volunteers drop each season's photographs into, the event announcement that runs across the top of every page is a single field, and the pages that change most often are the easiest ones to get at.

Nothing is bespoke, which is the point: there is no custom code to rot, and nothing that stops working when I am not around.

The committee has run the site themselves ever since. Several years of events have been added without me — new photographs each season, the dates refreshed each year, and the fiftieth-anniversary weekend in June 2027 already announced across the top of every page.