A historic club that had outlived its website
The Club d’échecs de la Ville de Genève (CEVGE) has been part of Geneva’s chess culture for generations. But while the game was finding a new audience, the club’s identity and digital experience were still rooted in another era.
CEVGE needed to hold onto what made it an institution, while becoming more open, useful and relevant to the next generation of players.
What we built
In order to help the club appeal to a broader audience, we designed a modern visual identity, carried through the site's logo, typography, colour, and layout.
We wanted to automate as much as the website as possible so keeping it up-to-date was simple task. As a result, the site is powered by a single Google Sheet that the club committee uses to track the club's activities:
Calendar and tournament results are pulled directly from the sheet and rendered through custom React components on the homepage and a dedicated calendar page, so new events appear fully stylised on the site as soon as they're entered.
Tournament results and standings are computed from the results tab in the same sheet and republish automatically.
Member ratings are kept current by a script that runs monthly, pulling each member's FIDE Elo, parsing the data, and updating the members table that feeds the member's page.
We also created unique features so that the activities happening inside we're visible to players outside:
The Vie du club (Life of the club) is a live, stylised feed from the club's Discord channel, built as a custom component, where images, updates and news can be shared directly from the mobile app. Once an admin approves the post with an emoji reaction, it's automatically published on the website homepage.
Puzzles: We created a daily puzzle feature drawn from a database of over 4,000 via the Lichess API.
Tournament generator: In order to facilitate in-house friendly tournament, we created a custom app that automatically pairs players and generates the full schedule, round by round, including byes for odd numbers.
The result is a site that stays current and is easy to maintain.
Impact
Since launch, interest in the club has grown, with subscriptions and sign-ups up significantly.
