A website a volunteer committee can run themselves.

The Kosmos Village Association represents property owners in the lakeside village of Kosmos. We rebuilt their website from the ground up: a new design, recovered content, a zoning guide for new owners, and a simple editor so the committee can keep it current.

Client: Kosmos Village Association
Sector: Non-profit residents’ association
What we did: Design, build, content migration, CMS
Website: kosmosvillageassociation.co.za

The new Kosmos Village Association home page, with a hot-air balloon over the water

01The brief

The association came to us with a clear list:

Five content pages
Google Map
Photo gallery
Enquiry form
Content management
Mobile-friendly and SEO-ready

Underneath the list sat a harder requirement: the site had to be run by volunteers. Committee members change, nobody has time to learn a complicated system, and there is no budget for a developer every time a notice goes up. It also had to look good — Kosmos is a beautiful place, and the old site did not show it.

02What we found

The previous site had served the association for years, but it was showing its age. Important documents — the constitution, fee schedules, AGM packs — were scattered or hard to find, and the layout did not work on a phone.

More seriously, our review showed that the old enquiry form had quietly stopped delivering messages after a server upgrade. Owners’ questions were going nowhere, and nobody knew.

So we audited everything before designing anything: which documents mattered, which content was still accurate, and which old links were still out there in emails and WhatsApp groups that needed to keep working.

By the numbers

What changed.

7pages — two more than the brief, including a zoning & land-use guide

18documents recovered, organised and published in one library

83%smaller photos than the originals, with no visible loss in quality

0databases to maintain — the content lives in a single file

03What we built

A fast, modern site that puts the association’s own photography front and centre, with the practical information owners actually look for one tap away.

A content editor the committee can use

Notices, committee details, fees and gallery photos are edited through a password-protected admin page. No database and no plugins to keep updated — the content lives in a single file that is easy to back up.

A zoning & land-use guide

Added after the committee’s first review. New owners often buy without knowing the local rules, and that is where most disputes start. The page explains what you may and may not do with a property, and where to check before you build.

A proper document library

Eighteen documents, including the constitution and the current fee schedule, recovered from the old site and published in one place with clear titles and dates.

An enquiry form that actually arrives

Rebuilt from scratch with spam protection and rate limiting, delivering straight to the committee’s inbox.

Nothing broken on the way

Every address from the old site redirects to its new home, so links in old emails, WhatsApp groups and search results keep working. Clean addresses like /zoning replace the old file names.

Designed for phones first

Most owners check notices on their phone. Every page was tested across phone, tablet and desktop sizes, right down to the photo captions and map controls.

A closer look

Around the site.

Zoning and land-use page with the planning documents owners should check — Zoning & land use — the page added after the committee’s feedback.

A short history of Kosmos on the About page — The village’s history, told with the association’s own photography.

The document library on the News page — News, notices and the document library.

Membership fees and what they pay for — Membership fees, and what they pay for.

The photo gallery, managed by the committee.

The home page on a phone — Home, on a phone.

The contact page and enquiry form on a phone — Contact and enquiry form.

04Under the hood

Deliberately simple technology, chosen so the association is never locked in — to us or to anyone else. Any competent web developer can pick it up and carry on.

HTML5CSS3Vanilla JavaScriptPHP JSON content storeClean URLscPanel hostingGoogle Maps

It runs on ordinary cPanel hosting with no database and no monthly licence fees, and it loads quickly even on a patchy mobile connection.

Need something like this?

Websites start from R3 000, and every project gets a fixed, written quote before any work begins.

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