A unified digital home for Inner West Sydney community clubs

Holman Barnes Group is one of the longest-running club groups in Inner West Sydney, with a family of community venues that span sports, hospitality, markets and major events. The group looks after thousands of members, hundreds of staff, millions in profit-for-purpose grants, and dozens of local sport, art and youth programs across Croydon, Ashfield, Haberfield, Leichhardt and surrounds.

The brief sat in two halves. The corporate side needed a serious digital home for the group story: who HBG is, how it is governed, where profit-for-purpose dollars go, the grants and scholarship programs, the Children's Cancer research partnerships, the careers hub, the annual reports, the media room. The venue side needed three sites that each stood on their own feet, with the kind of hospitality, bookings, events and food copy a local club member actually looks for on a Friday night.

Across every site, HBG wanted the content team to work from one place, with one set of design rules, so a group update could roll out everywhere without re-templating, and each venue could still speak in its own voice.

Defyn designed and built the four sites, Holman Barnes Group, Croydon Sports, Markets Club and Wests Ashfield, on one shared WordPress stack. The visual system is layered: a core component library handles layout, type, grid and interactions, and each venue sits on top with its own colour palette, photography and copy voice.

Content is modelled around what the HBG team actually ships. The corporate hub leads with the group story, governance, careers, profit-for-purpose, club grants, scholarships, annual reports, AGM and news. Venues lead with hospitality, memberships, what's on, bookings, food and drink, and the local community programs tied to their postcode.

The ACF-powered page builder gives the HBG marketing team the same editor experience across every site. News posts, careers, hospitality offers and events can be composed from the same block library, previewed in-place and published once. New sections added to the library (a promo banner, a new event layout, a sponsorship panel) become available everywhere without a dev cycle. See how Defyn approaches a build like this on our case studies page, or explore the full web development Sydney service.