One site, no chaos: building a reunion coordination system on Squarespace
How a purpose-built Squarespace site replaced expensive proprietary platforms and eliminated the disorganization that plagued previous reunions — for under $1,000 total.
<$1,000
Total cost, including platform and build time
~10 hrs
Total build time across more than two years
1 system
Schedules, RSVPs, ticketing, and coordination
The Problem
High school reunions are a logistical challenge with a built-in deadline and a committee of people who haven't formally worked together in decades. For the Sheboygan North class of 1980, previous reunions had exposed a recurring set of problems: no centralized place for information, inconsistent event details circulating across different channels, and confusion between ticket purchasers and event coordinators that generated endless back-and-forth email threads.
When the committee began planning their next reunion, they explored dedicated reunion platforms. The quotes they received would have required nearly doubling ticket prices just to cover the software cost — a non-starter for a volunteer-organized event with a fixed audience.
That's when my dad — who was tasked with finding a platform solution — came to me with a straightforward question: could I build something that solved the same problems for less?
The Approach
The goal wasn't to build a product. It was to design a system — a set of connected pages that directed every type of user (attendee, coordinator, ticket buyer) to exactly what they needed, without creating confusion or requiring technical knowledge to maintain.
The site was structured around five core functions:
A home page that oriented visitors and surfaced the most important actions. A schedule hub with consistent, up-to-date event information. A data update form that fed directly into Google Sheets for the committee's use. A ticketing flow that separated purchasers from coordinators cleanly. And an FAQ that absorbed the most common questions before they became emails.
The form-to-spreadsheet pipeline was the quiet workhorse of the whole system. Attendees submitted their information once; the committee saw it instantly, in a format they could actually use.
Working with a committee of people who share a 40-year-old connection but no formal working relationship required a different kind of project management than a typical client engagement. Decisions moved slowly. Opinions were strong and varied. Requests sometimes pushed toward features that would have added complexity without adding value.
A significant part of the work was listening carefully, absorbing the range of perspectives, and gently steering the group back toward core functionality when scope started to drift.
The Execution
Production ran over more than two years — not because the work was complex, but because the timeline allowed for it, and because the committee's capacity for decisions was limited. The real discipline was in how the time was used: thirty minutes here, thirty minutes there, always moving something forward without waiting for perfect conditions.
That pacing turned out to be an asset. It kept the project from overwhelming a volunteer committee, allowed changes to be absorbed gradually rather than all at once, and meant that by the time the reunion arrived, the site had been tested, revised, and refined across dozens of small sessions rather than rushed in a final sprint.
Less than ten total hours of effort — spread across more than two years — took the project from nothing to a fully functioning coordination system. The result was a site that felt inevitable. Like it had always been there, doing exactly what it needed to do.
The Outcome
The reunion ran with significantly less organizational friction than previous years. The committee had clean, centralized data. Attendees knew where to find information. The confusion between ticket buyers and coordinators — and the email threads it used to generate — didn't materialize.
Total cost came in under $1,000. The specialized platforms that had been quoted would have cost multiples of that for a single event. The difference stayed in the budget — and out of the ticket price.
The Takeaway
Most coordination problems aren't software problems. They're information architecture problems — a question of what lives where, who sees what, and how the system guides people toward the right action without needing to be explained. The right tool, configured thoughtfully, can do that work for a fraction of the cost of a specialized platform built to extract maximum value from a captive audience.
This project is a good example of what I mean when I talk about designing systems rather than just building sites. The technology was straightforward. The work was in understanding the terrain.
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