A full multi-page custom WordPress theme for one of Wigan's most historic amateur rugby league clubs — video hero, breaking news ticker, heritage page, venue hire, multiple team sections, SMTP2GO email, and full schema markup. Est. 1926.
Ince Rose Bridge Sports & Community Club was founded in 1926 and is one of Wigan's most established amateur rugby league clubs. Now a registered charity (number 1211303), the club runs an Open Age first team in the National Conference League — the top tier of amateur rugby league in England — alongside the Rose Bridge Pantheresses women's team, junior teams from age 8 through to 18, a Masters side, Mini Bridgers, a Learning Disability Rugby League (LDRL) section, and a new football section.
The club also operates as a community hub — hosting function room hire for weddings, parties, and events, a Scout Group on site, a 55-space car park, and bar and social facilities. Despite all of this, the club had no website. Their online presence was a Facebook page and an outdated Pitchero listing — nothing that reflected the scale or ambition of what they'd built. In 2025 they won the Believe Club of the Year award, and had recently secured the former Rose Bridge School field (Imperial Field) — over five times the size of their current Pinfold Street ground — through the FA Home Advantage Project and Pride in Place Impact Fund. They needed a website that matched the moment.
The brief was broad: a proper multi-page site that served every part of the club — rugby, community, venue hire, heritage, and sponsors — all built with the kind of care that reflects nearly 100 years of history.
The palette follows the club's red and white colours throughout — bold, proud, and unambiguous. The homepage features a dual video hero: a portrait-cropped asset for mobile and a landscape version for desktop, both autoplay and muted, with CSS media queries serving the right version at each breakpoint. This avoids the common issue of landscape videos cropping badly on portrait screens without any JavaScript or plugin overhead.
With the Imperial Field announcement, the new website launch, and a Club of the Year award all happening simultaneously, the club needed a way to surface news prominently without burying it in a blog. We built a horizontal scrolling news ticker — a CSS marquee with a duplicate content loop for seamless infinite animation. It features a news icon, colour-coded Breaking (red) and Update (amber) tags, and each story has bold headline text, a summary, and a "Read More" link. Four stories on launch: Imperial Field, new website, 2026 fixtures, and the Believe award.
The club's most famous former player is Bill Ashurst — a Wigan Warriors and Great Britain international who went on to play for Penrith Panthers in Australia, and had a mural unveiled at the club in October 2023. The dedicated heritage page tells the story of nearly 100 years of rugby in Ince, from the founding in 1926 through to the National Conference League first team today. Person schema for Bill Ashurst is implemented on the heritage page — one of the more unusual but historically significant schema implementations we've done.
Every major part of the club got its own page template: Home, About, Rugby (with sub-sections for each team), Community, Venue Hire, Gallery, Sponsors, Heritage, News Archive, single post template, Contact, Privacy Policy, and Code of Conduct. The news archive uses WordPress's native post system with custom templates for archive and single views — meaning the club can add match reports and news items directly from the WP admin without touching any code.
Contact and venue hire forms deliver via SMTP2GO (host: mail-eu.smtp2go.com, port: 2525, TLS) to the club's inbox with SPF and DKIM records verified. Schema markup covers SportsOrganization, LocalBusiness, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList, and Person across all templates — giving Google the full picture of what the club is, where it is, and who's connected to it.
Sports Club Website Design Case Study: This case study details how Mako Digital designed and built a custom WordPress website for Ince Rose Bridge Sports & Community Club, an amateur rugby league club and registered charity based in Ince-in-Makerfield, Wigan, founded in 1926. The project delivered a fully bespoke multi-page WordPress theme covering Home, About, Rugby, Community, Venue Hire, Gallery, Sponsors, Heritage, News Archive, single post template, Contact, Privacy Policy, and Code of Conduct — each a standalone PHP template with inline CSS and page-specific schema markup.
The project also covered a dual portrait/landscape video hero, a horizontal breaking news ticker with colour-coded story tags, SMTP2GO email configuration for contact and venue hire forms, SportsOrganization, LocalBusiness, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList, and Person schema across all pages, SSL installation via Hostinger, and Google Search Console verification and sitemap submission on launch day. If you run a sports club, charity, or community organisation in Wigan or the wider North West and need a proper website, get in touch with Mako Digital.
Whether you're a sports club, a charity, or a community organisation — we'll build something that reflects who you are and what you stand for.