Richard of Bordeaux Lodge 8333
The website for a West Kent masonic lodge founded in 1970 — when and where it meets, the charities it supports, and a direct line to its Secretary.
The brief
Richard of Bordeaux Lodge 8333 is a private lodge, founded on 4 November 1970 under charter from the United Grand Lodge of England, in the Province of West Kent. It is a Saturday lodge: four regular meetings a year at Wilmington Masonic Hall near Dartford, and a Lodge of Instruction on Wednesday evenings in Welling, where members rehearse ceremonies and get to know each other. Like every lodge it is run by volunteers, and the main point of contact is the Lodge Secretary.
The site had a narrow, practical job. Someone curious about the lodge should be able to find out what it is, when and where it meets, how much time it asks of people, and what it does for charity — and then reach the Secretary directly, without a phone number or a mutual acquaintance. It also had to sit properly inside the wider organisation: the Province, United Grand Lodge of England, and the Province’s data protection notice. And it had to cost the lodge no technical effort to keep running.
The details
The meetings page states a rule rather than a list of dates. The lodge always meets on the fourth Saturday of the same four months, starting at 4:30pm, with dinner at 7:00pm and finishing around 9:15pm. Written that way, the page stays correct year after year without anyone updating an events calendar — something a volunteer-run lodge is unlikely to keep up. It answers the practical questions too: where to park, how to find both venues, and what the evening involves, which tend to be the real questions before anyone gets in touch.
Every enquiry goes to one volunteer, so the contact form fits around the Secretary’s existing inbox rather than adding a new tool to learn. A server route checks the message first — every field filled, a real email address, a message long enough to answer — then sends it through Postmark on its own message stream, with the reply address set to the enquirer, so the Secretary answers from Outlook like any other email. There is no dashboard, no login to hand on when officers change, and no mail credential in the browser.
There is deliberately little to the site: no CMS, no database, no accounts. The lodge’s content changes a few times a year, and those updates come to us — the charity page gained the lodge’s Bronze Achievement Award a few weeks after launch. The site has stayed current underneath too: the contact form was rebuilt in 2025, and in 2026 it moved to Nuxt 4 on Vercel.
The outcome
The site was built in November and December 2023 and has been looked after by us since, through a contact form rebuild in 2025 and a move to Nuxt 4 on Vercel in 2026. Enquiries from people interested in the lodge go straight to the Secretary’s inbox, and the meetings and charity pages remain the lodge’s public record of what it does.