A website with a black belt

Back in 2019 we built the previous website for Judoclub Gent-Drongen. Seven years and hundreds of tournament reports later, it was ready for its next grading.

Because a judo club is not a brochure. Every week there’s training, fighting, winning, falling and getting back up again — and everybody wants to know about it: parents, grandparents, coaches and the judoka themselves. So the brief wasn’t just a new website, but a place where the club itself comes alive. Where members join the conversation and write the news, without the board ending up with a second full-time job.

Hajime.

The old WordPress site was packed with history, and all of it came along: more than 900 articles since 2011, each with its date, category, photos and galleries, plus 87 photo albums holding over 7,000 photos. Filter by results, competition or youth, or pick a year and browse back to your very first tournament.

Every article now takes comments and hearts. Putting a champion in the spotlight has never been easier.

At the heart of the new site is a member system with grades, just like on the mat. Anyone can create an account, but only after confirming their email address. A moderator tags who truly belongs to the club: from then on, comments go live instantly and you can share photos in the albums. Writing club news is yet another right, granted person by person.

Parents and fans get a label of their own. They join the conversation, but their comments are reviewed first. In a club with lots of children in the photos, you can never be too careful — which is also why photos are resized on upload and stripped of their metadata, GPS location included.

After a tournament, everyone wants to read the report. But whoever has to write it is sitting in the car with an exhausted judoka and a bag of fries. (In the passenger seat, we promise.)

So the writing page got a button: ✨ Verfraai met AI — Dutch for “beautify with AI”. Type your report the way it comes out of your thumbs — no capitals, three exclamation marks — and Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, turns it into a fluent club article, headline included. The rules are strict: names, results and weight classes are copied exactly, nothing is made up, and it sounds like a Flemish judo club rather than a press release.

Not happy with it? One click on Terug naar mijn tekst (“back to my text”) and your own version is back.

A human has the final say. A polished article never goes live directly. It lands in the moderation queue with a label that’s hard to miss: met AI verfraaid — check de feiten (“polished with AI — check the facts”). Every request is logged, cost included, and each person can use it twenty times a day: enough for a busy tournament day, too few to write a novel.

Moderators are volunteers, not a call centre. That’s why the site doesn’t send an email for every new comment. Once a day, in the morning, they get a single overview: who still needs to be reviewed, and which articles, comments and albums are waiting. Nothing to report? Then nothing arrives.

On the moderation page, everything is handled with one button per person: tag as club member, label as parent, grant writing rights, or suspend whoever misbehaves. A dashboard shows who takes part and how active it all is — so the board can see the club is just as lively online as it is on the mat.

The club has kept its calendar in Google Calendar for years, and it simply keeps doing so. The site reads that calendar directly — recurring events, coaches and locations included — and fishes the competitions and events out of hundreds of training sessions. No double entry, nothing that expires.

And for anyone trying to find their way: one map with the three dojos, route planning in a single tap, and for the hall on the Artevelde campus — which you’d otherwise never find — a little floor plan.

Club members add to the photo albums themselves; new albums wait for review first. Whoever writes an article picks photos with previews and sets the focal point of the cover photo with a single tap. Newsletter sign-ups go straight to Mailchimp with double opt-in. And the test environment sits behind a password, with a yellow bar so unmistakable that nobody ends up cheering on the wrong site by accident.

A website that feels like the club itself: warm and welcoming, with solid discipline behind the scenes. Members join the conversation, reports almost write themselves, and the board keeps track with one email a day.

Ippon.