A website for your community garden

Most gardens run on a Facebook group, and for the people already in it, that is genuinely good. The trouble is everyone else. Someone new to the street, at the point where they have finally unpacked and want to meet people, searches for a community garden and their suburb name. What comes back is mostly websites. If they do land on the group, a login wall meets them at the gate, and that is where a fair number of would-be volunteers quietly stop.

A website answers them instead. Where you are, which gate, when the working bees are, whether there is a plot going or a communal bed they can just turn up and help with. It also reads properly to the people who fund gardens. Councils, trusts and local funders look you up before they read your application, and what they want to find is a front door, not a feed they cannot see.

And the thing worth saying plainly: a garden is a community before it is a vege patch. Most people who walk in are looking for the company as much as the kai. A website is where you can say that out loud, to someone who has not met any of you yet.

The honest other side: if your plots are full, you have a waiting list, and your Facebook group is humming, you may not need us at all. We would rather say that here than waste your evening.

Every volunteer-run garden knows this one. One person held the whole thing in their head: the lease, the water key, the compost roster, who to ring about the mower. Then they move city, and half of it walks out the gate with them. The website version of the same story is a site set up years ago by someone from the working group, with a login nobody has and billing on a cancelled card, and now nobody can change the working bee times.

Ours is built the other way. The domain is registered in the garden group's name, never ours. Hosting is free, so there is no subscription to lapse when the treasurer changes. The whole site can be exported free at any time, so you are not locked to us either. Handover to the next coordinator is one line in the folder: the website, changes by email to the studio, $20 a batch.

The site is complete when it goes live. Not a shell waiting for you to fill it in on a weeknight. If nothing about the garden changes for three years, the site can sit exactly as it is, working the whole time, costing you nothing.

It grows because we stay behind it. When something happens worth showing, you email us and say so, in whatever words you have. We draft the change, send it back for you to check, and it goes up once you say yes. A batch of edits is $20. And if something on the site is wrong, we fix it for nothing, because that is not a change, that is us not having got it right. We will not promise same day, and everything goes through us rather than a dashboard you have to learn, which is the point: nobody on your committee has to become the website person.

What that looks like across a few seasons. The photos from the spring working bee, once someone has actually taken some. A harvest day page in late summer, with what was shared and who came. The year the new tunnel house goes up, and the page that shows it standing instead of the drawing in the grant application. A thank-you page that keeps growing: the funder who paid for the fence, the family who donated the trailer-load of compost, the school class that planted the fruit trees. None of that is planned at the start. It just gets added as it happens.

Every site we build can also carry an on-site assistant that answers using only the words already on your own pages, for the questions visitors actually arrive with: how do I get a plot, when is the next working bee, can I bring the kids. It is included in the price and entirely opt-in, and the site works exactly as well without it.

All of it stays yours. Your domain, your content, nothing monthly, and a free export any time you want to take the whole lot somewhere else.