Franco-British Data Society: a bespoke Ghost website for a Franco-British association

Client

Franco-British Data Society — a Franco-British association devoted to data and artificial intelligence, bringing researchers, businesses and institutions together on both sides of the Channel across some forty events since 2019.

Industry

Association — professional network in data and AI

Services provided

• WordPress to Ghost CMS migration
• Bespoke Ghost theme design and development
• Managed Ghost hosting
• Memberships and newsletter setup
• Contact database migration and clean-up
• Editorial team training

Project objective

The Franco-British Data Society was running on a WordPress site hosted at OVH, inherited from its early years. The site told the story of the association badly: a dense events diary, a substantial board, and memberships at several levels — none of it easy to find.

Three objectives were set:

1. Make the diary readable. An association that runs events is judged on its diary. Theirs buried the next meetings inside six years of archive.
2. Give it a Franco-British identity worth the name, without falling back on decorative flags.
3. Make the team self-sufficient: publish an event, add a board member, send a newsletter, without calling us.

The challenge

• Bring across all the WordPress content without losing the event history
• Separate upcoming events from past ones — something Ghost cannot do on its own
• Build a theme that stands comparison with the institutional sites in the sector
• Take over a contact list built by hand, in a spreadsheet, over several years
• Ship a back office a volunteer team can genuinely run

Solutions implemented

A bespoke, version-controlled Ghost theme

The site runs on a theme built specifically for the association, tracked in its own Git repository with a tagged version at every stage — the association can roll back at any point.

The design takes the blue, white and red common to both flags and uses them as a thin band rather than a flat wash. Each page carries a photographic banner of London or Paris, and restrained scroll animations give the reading a rhythm without slowing it down.

A shared partners block is declared once in the theme and appears on the home page, the About page, the contact page and the team page: updating a logo is a single edit.

The diary, split into upcoming and past

This is the technical centrepiece. Ghost cannot compare a publication date to "now" from inside a theme — the filter exists in the API but comes back empty at template level.

So we turned the problem around: the page renders every event server-side, each carrying its date in a data attribute, and a script sorts them into two sections on load — the next meetings first, the archive after. Events whose date is still to be confirmed count as upcoming, which is what the association expects.

Pagination was fixed in the same pass: visitors were only ever seeing the twelve most recent events out of the forty-one on the site, because the page links never rendered. The full history is reachable again.

Memberships, newsletter and contact base

Ghost also serves as the membership engine. The different member levels — board, standard, startup, student — are managed directly in the back office, with payment going to the association's own account.

The mailing list, until then kept in a spreadsheet, was taken over: 188 contacts imported, de-duplicated, attached to their membership level and subscribed to the newsletter. The import was labelled so it stays reversible.

Editorial structure and legal pages

The team section separates the association's patrons from its board members, each with their role. Legal information, the privacy policy and the cookie policy were written and filed under a secondary navigation in the footer.

A step-by-step approach

1️⃣ WordPress content migration — pages, events and board members imported and restructured as Ghost content.

2️⃣ A beta version on a subdomain — the association signed off design and navigation before any cutover.

3️⃣ Design rebuild — banners, animations, partners block, four-column footer.

4️⃣ Team training — dedicated sessions: publishing an event, updating a member entry, and understanding how the feature image automatically becomes the page banner.

5️⃣ Cutover to the final domain francobritishdatasociety.org, then the contact base migration.

Results

The association publishes its own events, entirely independently. The diary leads with what is coming rather than what has been, the archive stays reachable, and memberships and the newsletter live in the same back office as the content — with no external tool to keep in sync.

Conclusion

An association that runs events doesn't need a brochure site: it needs a diary that works, a members area, and an interface volunteers can handle between two meetings. Ghost covers all three, provided you are willing to write the small amount of code the CMS doesn't give you.

Running an association and losing control of your website?

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