The website for my running club, Gosport Road Runners, needs to be redone.

It's satisfactory for what it does but it's far too static and relies too much on me to update it (and I've moved away from the local area for a while at least). There is also the issue that a lot of the photos and comment from club members is now on Facebook after I took down the phpBB forum that was too big for what was needed and attracted too much spam.

My work has steered me towards Drupal and away from Joomla and so I'd like to rebuild the site in Drupal 7 (which is what I'm using at work). A lot of the modules in Drupal 7 aren't quite mature enough to be considered reliable but if you keep your eye on them and don't use the functionality that has bugs in it it works fine.

Step number one for a refresh has to be to see how the current site is being used and the popular pages are:

The first page (as well as 6th, 7th, and 8th) are related to the half marathon race that the club puts on each year. Currently the half marathon is themed slightly differently (light blue as opposed to dark blue) although I'm not sure if that is truly necessary.

The pages at positions 2 (About The Club) and 3 (Joining) are always going to get a lot of hits because they will be the pages that people who are looking to join the club are going to view.

It pays to know your users as they are rather than what you expect them to be. Working on museum websites with large collections of interesting objects and articles is great until you realise that almost half the people that visit the site just want to know what time you open. No matter what great 3D walkthroughs or search facilities you can build, a static page with a map and some times will need to have equal prominence and be on or one-click away from the home page.

I think that the site needs to have some sort of forum system for users as well as a way to upload photos - the flat one-topic nature of Facebook doesn't encourage any real depth. That said, my experience with user forums elsewhere suggests that you start off with too few topics and reluctantly expand rather than creating lots of topics and then later culling the quieter ones.

Something that doesn't show up here but gets a lot of hits is the newsletter downloads. A PDF is created once a month which is uploaded and the link to it is emailed out to the club members. This also needs to be easy to find through the menu system. I am hoping that some of the articles will trickle out onto the website to keep the turnover of content high enough to keep people coming back and interested.

From the table above I know that a quick glance at the home page of the website needs to show as its main focus:

1. Gosport Half Marathon
2. Joining

Although I may give them equal weighting but put 'joining' first as that's more the priority of the site.