Kingston Chess Club Website

The first website for the club (using the domain kingstonchess.org.uk) was established by in 2009 by John Foley using a template from Michael K Bennett of Barnet Chess Club. It won the ECF Chess Club Website of the Year in 2010 with the citation “It was the general feel of the website providing information as well as comment and news in an entertaining way. The webmaster is John Foley”.

The website template was developed using an open source content development tool called Textpattern running off an online MySQL database.   Most of the site editing was done with a built-in editor called Textile which converts normal text into HTML.  This allowed club members to update a website without having to learn HTML. In practice, few members had the IT skills to grapple with the website updating.

The Facebook page was created by former member Othman Z. Syed in 2011. The Facebook page was closed in July 2022 as it received little interaction. The Twitter account was created by John Foley in November 2015.

The Kingston RapidPlay had its own website (https://kingstonchessrapidplay.co.uk/) when it was launched in 2018. Former, club member Ed Mospan was the event organiser and the webmaster.

In 2021, the website was completely revamped by Lju Lazarevic: the domain was changed to the present kingstonchess.com. A barebones WordPress theme running on Amazon Web Service proved to be much easier to use thereby attracting new contributors. Stephen Moss shares editorial control with Lju and John Foley who is the also the games editor.