Website

Taranaki Tai Chi Chuan Association

A website the committee can run themselves, after a year offline.

Visit the live site → Delivered in 4 weeks
7
venues across Taranaki
9
classes each week
1 year
offline before the rebuild

The challenge

Taranaki Tai Chi Chuan Association had been without a working website for nearly a year. The WordPress site had been built by a volunteer who later stood down, with no handover and nobody left on the committee who knew how to operate it. When the hosting was upgraded in the background the site broke, and the association disappeared from the web entirely. They had a Toi Foundation grant to put toward a replacement, and one requirement behind it: whatever came next had to be something the committee could run themselves, without depending on one member's technical knowledge.

Our approach

Before any decision about a new site, we got the old one back online. The committee needed something live while they weighed their options, so we cleared the broken plugins and left it running. Community organisations rarely have a budget in the usual sense; they have whatever funding they have managed to secure. We work to that number. For the Association it meant scoping the build to their Toi Foundation grant and delivering inside it, with nothing quietly downgraded to make it fit: the same custom build, the same members area, the same admin access a commercial client would get. Where funding will not stretch to everything at once, we say plainly which parts can wait, and add them when the next grant lands. We also set out what prebuilt platforms like Wix and Sporty would and would not do for an organisation like theirs, so the committee could take a real comparison to its meeting rather than a sales pitch, and we offered a 50% refund if within three months the site was not what they needed. A grant-funded decision should not be a one-way bet. From kickoff we worked in review rounds: publish, walk through it together, apply their edits, repeat. The content came from their existing site, reworked for the new design, so nothing they had already written was lost.

The solution

A custom website rather than a template on someone else's platform. The public pages cover the practice, the weekly timetable across seven venues, events, contact and membership, with the first class free invitation carried throughout. Behind a password sits the members area: form videos, written guides, Qigong sets and the association's own policies and documents, together in one place instead of scattered across Google Drive and YouTube. The committee has its own admin login. They add and update classes, events, resources and memberships without asking us. Every page carries the Toi Foundation credit and the Sport Taranaki Community Strength and Balance partnership.

The outcome

The new site went live in June 2026 at taichiqigong.co.nz, on the association's existing domain. The broken WordPress install and the Windows hosting plan behind it were retired; only the domain registration remains to renew. The association is no longer one volunteer's availability away from losing its website, and the whole build was delivered inside the funding the Association had already secured.

"Xavier is very approachable and willing to adapt and work with you. We were quite clear from the beginning: this is what we've got, and do you think you can do it for this price? Yeah, no problem."

Julia - club officer

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