Put Your Club on the Internet
More Kiwanis clubs are creating a presence on the World Wide Web in order to further club projects and goals. Your club doesn't have to be left behind.
If you would like to put your club on the Internet, here's what you need to do:
- Talk to your club's board and get its support.
- Find a person or small group of volunteers who would be willing to build and maintain the site. Sites, once posted, must be kept up to date in order to maintain credibility, so an updating method must be part of your plan.
- Decide if you want to get a domain name for your club or make use of an existing web address. This issue has several components:
- Your own domain name gives you a more easily remembered address, such as www.yourclub.com (or www.yourclub.org), instead of www.ispname.com/~yourclubname.
- While getting your own domain name can cost as much as $35 per year, it also can make it more difficult to find free space on a web server for your site.
- Locate space on a web server where your site will be posted. There are many options for this, many of them free:
- A site belonging to a club member.
- Several web server companies will allow not-for-profit groups to post sites for free. Talk to your local Internet service providers, which may be willing to aid a local community group. You also may find a community web site which makes space available to all non-profit groups; there are some run by newspapers, Internet Service Providers or Chambers of Commerce in various areas.
- Purchase space on a web server; fees would range from $5 to $50 per month depending on services provided, length of contract and other factors.
If you decide to purchase space for your web site and register your own domain name, nearly all web server companies now offer domain registration so both jobs can be done in the same place.
- Consult the Kiwanis International Web Site Guidelines for requirements and approved practices.
- Determine what the goals are for the site. Do you want to inform club members? Members of your community? The world at large? All of the above? You need to determine who your audience will be before you design the site.
Once you've accomplished that, you can turn to the nuts and bolts of creating a web site. You can put your club on the web without having to spend months learning HTML or hiring a graphic artist.
Building a Web Site
Graphics and other assistance in building a web site are available on the Kiwanis International Web site.
The Kiwanis logos are available for club use and can be downloaded from the Kiwanis International web site.
You can prepare web pages by writing them in HTML. Or, you can use one of many software packages – including one you may already have – to prepare the pages.
Netscape Composer, part of the Netscape Communicator package, can be used to create web pages and is free. Major word processing programs, such as WordPerfect or Microsoft Word, also allow documents to be exported in HTML format, although the results will not be as clean as with programs designed to create web pages.
Microsoft Publisher also has the ability to create web sites. Microsoft Front Page may be the most common program used for web site creation, and it is less expensive than Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe Go Live, which are commonly used by web site professionals.
You also could use HTML Kit, which is available in both free and professional versions.
Look at your help system in those applications for tips on web page building.