Wix to Ghost migration for the FAFGB: a 39-association directory inside an institutional website

Client

Fédération des Associations Françaises en Grande-Bretagne (FAFGB) — the network that has federated French and French-speaking associations across the United Kingdom since 1942. Thirty-nine member associations.

Industry

Association — federation of associations

Services provided

Wix to Ghost CMS migration
Bespoke institutional Ghost theme
Managed Ghost hosting
Structuring the member association directory
Membership and contribution forms
A newsletter built into the site, sent from Ghost

Project objective

The Federation's website was living on Wix. The content had frozen: hard to update, impossible to evolve without going back through the visual editor, and with no clear structure for what is the heart of the Federation — the directory of its member associations.

The brief was precise: bring across 100% of the existing content as-is first, onto a modern base, and keep editorial improvements for a second stage. No rewriting the message at the same time as the plumbing.

The challenge

Extracting content locked inside Wix, which offers no usable export
Finding a structure that makes the association directory both navigable and maintainable
Giving the Federation a credible institutional presence, worthy of its eighty years
Letting member associations contribute content without an admin account

Solutions implemented

Extraction and content migration

The Wix content was recovered page by page — seventy-three documents — then rebuilt as Ghost content: 68 items imported and fifteen categories.

The structural decision: everything is an article

The decision the whole project rests on is counter-intuitive: the site has no Ghost pages at all. Everything is an article, organised by category.

In practice, one member association = one article, filed under an "Associations" category sorted alphabetically. The benefit is immediate: adding an association means writing an article, exactly like publishing a news item. No template to touch, no menu to edit.

Each association also carries an invisible internal marker — military, education, cultural, regional, alumni, charitable, institutional — qualifying its nature without cluttering the public display. Those markers do nothing for the visitor today; tomorrow they will let the directory be filtered by type without anyone re-entering a thing.

A French institutional identity

The design direction draws on the official sites of the French Republic: deep navy, red as an accent, square corners, no drop shadows, and Marianne, the French state's official typeface, under an open licence.

The home page opens on a Franco-British illustration and a grid of quick-access cards. The footer carries the London skyline inherited from the old site. Restrained scroll animations add rhythm without weight.

Forms and contributions

Two forms were put in place, outside the CMS: a membership application for candidate associations, collecting their purpose, legal status, headcount and named contact with explicit GDPR consent, and an article submission letting any member association propose a subject, an image and a text with no back-office access at all.

This is the least visible gain and the most useful day to day. The signup form is built into the home page, wired to Ghost's native member engine — not to a third-party emailing service.

In practice, the Federation writes a news item and sends it to its subscribers from the same interface: no list to export, no copy-paste into another tool, no separate subscription that grows with the audience. Signups land in the site, campaigns go out from it, and the list belongs to the Federation.

That's something Wix couldn't do without paying for an extra module.

An "Association guide" category

A dedicated editorial section was opened for practical content aimed at associations — the kind of thing that brings people back to a federation's site between annual meetings.

A step-by-step approach

1️⃣ Wix content extraction, document by document.

2️⃣ Rebuild as Ghost articles — 68 items, 15 categories, associations sorted alphabetically.

3️⃣ Theme development — home page, article template, category template and footer entirely rewritten.

4️⃣ Full acceptance testing — every item and every category page checked, mobile rendering included.

5️⃣ Go-live on fafgb.org, then successive additions: home illustration, article thumbnails, a two-tier header with social links, the guide category.

Results

The Federation now has a directory it updates the way it publishes an article, an identity that matches its standing, a contribution channel open to its thirty-nine members, and a newsletter that goes out straight from the site. The content is no longer locked inside a proprietary editor: it lives in an open-source CMS and can be exported at any time.

Conclusion

Migrating off Wix isn't just changing tools: it is the moment to choose a content structure that will hold. The "everything is an article" bet looks radical, but it is precisely what makes the directory maintainable by volunteers — and that is exactly what a federation's website has to do.

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