A website for a recovery community in Peterlee.

Client

Lee Black Foundation CIC, Peterlee, County Durham

What they do

A weekly recovery meeting, mental health support and fundraising for local families

The job

A one-page website, built free of charge

Where it’s at

Built. It goes live once the family are happy with the words

The brief: get someone through the door on Thursday

The foundation does a lot: a push-up challenge in Lee’s name, a charity boxing night, their own football team, a community allotment growing food for care packages, and stalls in the town centre. But one thing matters more than the rest. Somebody who is struggling with drink, drugs or their mental health needs to find out, quickly, that there’s a meeting every Thursday at 5:30pm at St Cuthbert’s Church, and that they can just turn up.

So the whole page is built around that one visit. Everything else (the story, the events, the ways to help) comes after it.

Help numbers before anything else

Someone might land on the page at 2am, not on a Thursday. So the very top of the page, above the logo, is a strip with the Samaritans and NHS mental health numbers, and the full list (including FRANK and Shout’s text line) has its own section further down. Every number is a tap-to-call or tap-to-text link on a phone.

The front page: Lee, made from his community

Behind the brush stroke is a wall of the foundation’s own photos from Facebook: fundraisers, challenges and match days. Lee’s silhouette is filled with the same photos, so the first thing you see is Lee made out of the people who carry on in his name. Underneath is their own line, #AlwaysHere.

The photos all come from their public Facebook page, and nobody from the recovery meetings is shown in a way that picks them out.

What happens on a Thursday

Walking into a room of strangers is the hard part. Instead of “support group, all welcome”, the page says exactly what happens: walk in, grab a brew, and you don’t have to talk if you don’t want to. There’s also a countdown to the next Thursday at 5:30pm, so it always feels close.

Brick by brick

Everything else the foundation does is laid out as a wall, one brick per thing, in their own red and royal blue. It shows how much a small group of family and friends gets done, without turning it into a long list.

Built to be found

A website only helps if the person who needs it can find it. So it has the same foundations every site I build gets:

• A page title and description that say what it is and where: recovery and mental health support in Peterlee.
• The meeting day, time and place written in plain text near the top, so Google and AI tools like ChatGPT can read it and repeat it correctly.
• Structured data (the labels search engines read) for the foundation and its weekly meeting, plus a plain-text summary file for AI tools.
• Fast on a phone and tested on every width from 320 to 430 pixels, with no sideways scrolling.
• Checked against the WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standard, with no issues found on a phone.

Handled with care

This is a real family remembering a real person. The page never guesses at anything only they should tell, and Lee’s story is waiting to be written in the family’s own words. I’ve marked every line I wrote for them to check before anything goes live.

Where it’s at

The site is built and the foundation has seen it. It goes live once the family have shared Lee’s story and how people can donate. I’ll update this page when it’s live.

Got a community group, charity or small business that needs a proper website? Have a look at web design across Teesside or my prices.