BACA Chess — a premium home for a growing community
An editorial marketing site for the UK’s fastest-growing chess community.
In service of A chess community that had outgrown its own website — and the volunteers who have to maintain it.
Result A five-page editorial site, deployable before the CMS was even connected — and accessible by default.
A five-page marketing site for BACA Chess (1,500+ members, sell-out London events) — editorial, media-forward design on a low-maintenance stack the club can keep running itself.
BACA Chess had the community — 1,500+ members and sell-out London nights — and needed a site that looked like it. So the design leads with their own photography and video: a full-screen media hero, proof points that count up on load, and an editorial layout that treats the club like the brand it already is.
The engineering goal was that it should be cheap to run and outlive my involvement. It's a static build with a CMS behind it, and it renders correctly even before the CMS is connected — approved copy lives in a typed fallback layer, so the site was deployable from day one and degrades gracefully if a field is ever empty.
Care went into the parts nobody thanks you for: no tracking cookies, no analytics and self-hosted fonts (a minimal UK GDPR footprint), semantic landmarks, visible focus rings, alt text throughout, and full keyboard access for the menu, modals and lightbox — with prefers-reduced-motion respected everywhere.