Building A Club Website / Club Website Help

Write the content for your audience not yourself. For example, when a potential guest (who is not a TM) comes to your page, they're not going to know the difference between a schedule and agenda. Nor will they know what a TMOE or TMOD are, nor the reason for a Timer, Grammarian, etc. Only include information that will help them (a) Decide whether they want to come to a meeting; (b) find your meeting; (c) impress them with the quality of your Club.

Decide first whether you want your site to be mostly for guests who are not Toastmasters, or for your Club Members, or both. In most cases, content for your members will need to be changed frequently to be at all useful, while content for your guests can pretty much stay unchanged once it's posted. Before you decide to put up pages for your members that include items such as Newsletters, Agendas, Schedules, etc, be sure you know your own limitations. Don't bother doing it if you won't be able to keep it up-to-date. If it's out of date, your members won't look at your page, and visitors who are just perusing your site, will think that your club is defunct or that you don't pay attention to details -- not an impression you want to be projecting.

Be mindful of your members' privacy. Don't put email addresses, postal addresses, or phone numbers on publicly accessible areas of your site unless you have their written permission. This includes Rosters, Schedules, and Newsletters that include these items. However, putting this information in a password-protected area is a great solution.

The Guest section of your site will have mostly static content, so you probably don't need to worry too much about out-dated content there. However, if you have a section that focuses on information of use mostly to Members, then that content probably changes frequently. Sooner or later, whoever updates that information will have a situation-change that keeps them from updating the information as frequently as they once did. When that happens (when not if), then the site will start looking old and outdated and will reflect badly on the Club. Guests will stumble on those pages and decide the Club isn't worth paying attention to.

Therefore, before developing any pages with content that needs to be kept up-to-date, make sure you have a plan for what to do when the site isn't being kept up-to-date as zealously as it once was. This is crucial. If you can't do this when you first think of creating pages that need to be kept up-to-date, then it's not worth doing those pages at all. The damage that they can do to your Club far outweighs any benefit from those pages.

Use normal size fonts and avoid underlining (because that signifies a link to be clicked on) and avoid bolding or italics more than is absolutely necessary.

Avoid glitzy items and things that "look cool". Remember, people come to your website to look for information, not to see what you're capable of putting onto a page. Glitzy items have a tendency to distract the eye from seeing what's important. Ask yourself, How dos this enhance my message?. If it's something that aids navigation, makes it easier to read, or enhances the content, then fine. Otherwise, it's probably a bad idea to use it.

Limit your content to only part of the screen width. People's eyes get tired trying to read across a wide screen. If you notice this page, it's divided into 2 - 3 columns (depending on your screen resolution). The content is only in the 2nd column.

Avoid backgrounds that have logos or textures that may make it difficult to read the content. Notice that this background is white.

There are 2 basic types of graphics -- those meant to be printed and those meant to be placed on a website. Please only use those that are specifically designed to be placed on a website. Although they may look the same, images for print are a lot bigger in the number of kilobytes than those designed for the web. A good web graphic is usually less that about 20K - 30K, while a good print graphic is frequently 100K - 300K. If you put a 300K graphic on your website, a potential guest will leave your website before the page finishes loading -- they'll never even see most of you have to say to them! If you've noticed, we have 2 separate pages of graphics for people to download and use from this website -- one is Graphics For Printing and one is Graphics For Websites .

In addition, you should generally use jpg images for pictures and photos, gif or png images for most other graphics. Never use a bmp image.

Most people have monitors that are set at 800 x 600. Therefore, that's what yours should be set at while you're designing a page. However, there are enough people that use other settings that you should test your pages at 800 x 640 and 1024 x 768 to ensure they look acceptable at those resolutions.

Many people still use 56K modems. Therefore, if you have a fast Cable Modem or DSL, then you should try to dial in at 56K, to make sure your site downloads quickly. Very few people still use 28K modems, so I wouldn't worry about that speed.

Test under different browsers to ensure that your page shows up reasonable well under them. Not all browsers display pages the same. For example, if you leave out a closing tag within a TABLE, IE will show the page reasonably well, but many versions of Netscape will show a blank or totally corrupted page. Old versions of browsers can be found at http://browsers.evolt.org. In particular, old Netscape browsers can be found at http://browsers.evolt.org/?navigator and old Opera browsers can be found at http://browsers.evolt.org/?opera. If you use DHTML, CSS, or Javascript, then it's really important that you test under as many different browsers and versions as possible, as the standards for those technologies are not consistently followed by any browser.

There are a lot of choices available if you're willing to pay for them or if you know HTML and can write your own code. If you need a free GUI editor, however, there are only a few I know of. Since I haven't used them, please let me know your thoughts.

Amaya is an Open Source tool sponsored by the standards body that develops all web standards (the W3C.org). It is both a browser and WYSIWYG web tool that allows you to develop web pages without knowing anything about HTML or CSS. You can create your pages, view them, and upload them to your website using this software. It supports CSS (including CSS 2), HTML, XHTML, etc. There are versions for Windows, Mac, and Unix.

Composer, which comes with the free Open-Source Mozilla browser. You can download Mozilla from www.mozilla.org. Here is a review of the Mozilla Composer . Here is a tutorial on using Mozilla Composer . From reading the review, it appears that Composer has 2 huge weaknesses (1) Lack of CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) support, and limited drag-and-drop support. There a versions for Mac, Windows, Linux, and other platforms.

Trellian Web Page - has a drag and drop interface, a preview screen that allows you to see your page under the three most common screen widths, built-in FTP uploader, table creation wizard, form creation tool, etc. It also allows you to switch back-and-forth between GUI and HTML editing.

For additional tools, see the Free Country .

Other free tools which may not be GUI can be found at freeprogrammingresources or slackerhtml or freedownloadscenter or Search Google .

An email mailing list is not specifically a website issue. However, it is a great adjunct to a website. You can use yahooGroups as one. Using this feature, you would add all your members to the list. Then, whenever a new roster or schedule is created, or whenever anyone wants to email everyone in the club, they just send the email to the mailing list and it gets automatically forwarded to all the members in your Club. Go to www.yahoogroups.com for details. There are plenty of other ways to do this (including maintaining your own), but I recommend this solution for simplicity.

A domain name is a personalized website address like d27tm.org or mywebsite.com. They generally cost between $10 and $35 annually. There are 2 advantages to them. First, if you need to move your website from one web host to another, your website address doesn't need to change (assuming your new provider allows domain names to point to them). The second advantage is it allows your club to have a very specific personalized website address.

Free and low-cost hosts and many ISP's don't always allow you to have a domain name that points to them because they figure that's a business and want you to pay more. Therefore, keep that in mind if you have a domain name and want to switch where you're hosting your website.

• Free or low-cost (under $30 annually) hosting without ads. I have several listed below. Please let me know of others (but only after you've used it enough to know that it's reasonably good). Be wary of any catches that may come with them. They may also be here today and gone tomorrow, so make sure you keep a backup copy of your pages.
• Company websites. If you are in a company club, then you might be able to get your company to host the page for you. If you are in a closed club or if the company's website is publicly accessible, and if they'll allow you to maintain the website yourself, then this is ideal. Just remember that if they want you to host it on their Intranet, then no one outside the company can get to the page.
• A member's ISP. Most ISP's allow free hosting. This is a reasonable solution. The 2 major drawbacks are that (a) the name of the website might be convoluted; (b) if the member leaves or doesn't want to do the website anymore, then you have get a copy of the website, move it, and publicize the new website address.
• Medium Cost ($50 - $120). This is probably more than a club needs to pay. Therefore, I am not listing any here.
• Places like Geocities, Tripod, and AngelFire. These have free and for-pay options. The free options usually have extremely annoying pop-up adds that cause me not to want to go to the site. The pay-for options are usually more than a club should pay. Therefore, I am not listing any here.

• Google searches: Toastmasters and free website hosting or Free Web Hosting
• Reviews by 100 Best Free Web Space Providers
• Reviews by FTP Planet
  
  
• The following appear to be completely free (or less than $30) with no advertisements. Be sure to read their Privacy Policies before signing up to be sure you're OK with them. One of these may be your best choice. Please read the reviews for these sites and do some research of your own .They may be exactly what you're looking for. Since I haven't used any of these sites (unless noted), I can't vouch for them. I'd like to hear other people's experiences with them. This information is accurate as of January 2004, based on information located on other websites. The District is not responsible for any outdated information.
  
  
  • www.freetoasthost.org is a free web hosting plan for Toastmasters Clubs. It looks like they dictate the look-and-feel of your site, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
  • www.atspace.com
  • members.freewebs.com ... Read Reviews in FTP Planet ... Read Reviews in 100 Best Free Completely free. Optional domain names can be put on sites hosted here.
  • www.homepage-host.uni.cc ... Read Reviews in FTP Planet ... Completely free. I don't know whether you can add a domain name.
  • www.doteasy.com ... Read Reviews in 100 Best Free ... The site is free. However, they do require a domain name from them for $25 annually.
  • www.microworld.com ... Read Reviews in 100 Best Free ... The site is free, but they charge $25 for domain names.
  • www.wwwhosts.net ... Read Reviews in FTP Planet ... Starts at $2 per month.
  • www.artcliff.com ... Read Reviews in 100 Best Free ... The site is free. Domain Name Registration is required for $15 per year.
  
  
• The following offer your choice of a free website with ads of some sort or medium-price hosting which don't have ads
  
  • geocities.yahoo.com
  • www.tripod.lycos.com
  • www.angelfire.lycos.com
  • www.topcities.com
  • www.freewebsitehosting.com Gives you a choice of banner ads or annoying pop-ups.
  • www.freewebpage.org
  • www.netfirms.com ... Read Reviews
  • www.nu3.net
  • www.50megs.com
  • www.20fr.com (free only, with banner) ... Read Reviews