King’s Lynn & West Norfolk Pride is a volunteer-run LGBTQIA+ advocacy group, soon to become a registered charity. They put on the yearly Pride parade and celebration, plus events and advocacy work throughout the rest of the year.
What was wrong
The old site was built in WordPress with Bricks Builder. Bricks is powerful, but it’s made for people who build websites for a living. For a team of volunteers, changing a date or adding an event meant finding the one person who knew how, and hoping they had a free evening.
Then KLWN Pride went through a full rebrand, and the old site was out of date overnight. It was time to start again.
What I did
A custom WordPress theme with custom plugins, built around one idea: the site should be the hub. The first place local people go for Pride, for community groups and for what’s on, and a resource that belongs to the community rather than just the committee.
The details:
- A community section that lists local groups and lets people submit their own content: artwork, stories, statements. The site grows with the community, not just with the committee’s to-do list.
- One-off online donations, handled by SumUp. Every payment is confirmed through a handshake between the server and SumUp before it’s recorded, so a donation that says it went through actually did.
- Editing through clearly labelled custom fields built with Carbon Fields. Volunteers fill in boxes; they don’t have to navigate a site builder or worry about breaking the layout.
The launch
Five weeks from first idea to live. Most of that time went on testing: the custom plugins, and especially the donation flow. When real money is involved, “it worked when I tried it” isn’t good enough, so the SumUp handshake was tested until it couldn’t fail quietly.
The site went live on 3 June 2026.
What happened
The site is live, hosted and maintained by me, and the volunteers run the content themselves. That was the whole point: a Pride group should spend its evenings organising Pride, not fighting its website.
What I’d do differently
Launch smaller and build over time. The scope was ambitious, and five weeks was longer to launch than I’d have liked. The core site could have gone live first, with donations and community submissions following once it was bedded in. Getting something useful live sooner almost always beats getting everything live at once.