Designing and Creating a Club Web Page

Rick Clements, AbleTM-S, CL

District 7 Toastmasters Leadership Institute
This is the material covered on the overheads for the session.

This column contains notes on material that was discussed during the presentation.

Use of the World Wide Web

5 Years Ago
  • Few people knew about the web
 Today
  • Important tool
  • Groups with pages
    • Government
    • Companies
    • News media
    • Organizations
  • 2 guests in the 1st month International linked to our page

Where to Start?

  • Like a speech - what's your purpose?
  • Publicity to potential guests
  • Keep club members informed
  • Can do both
  • Can do one, add other later

Publicity

  • On line brochure
  • Low maintenance
  • Benefits of Toastmasters
  • Benefits of your club
  • Where & when you meet
  • Special events
Starting with benefits, discusses features to include on the page.

The benefits of Toastmasters and your club could be combined.

Inform Club Members
As an example, this is information our club has on it's web page.

Re: First names & initials - putting information on a web page is like putting it on a billboard on the freeway.  Don't put anything our your page that you wouldn't be comfortable putting on a billboard.

KISS (Keep It Simple Señior)

  • Easier to maintain
  • Easier to navigate
  • Faster to load
  • Better viewed on smaller screens
At work, many people can view two full pages with 80 characters of text on a row.  Many people at home can see part of a single page with 80 characters of text.  Web TV can display about 40 characters of text.

We want it to be easy of people to view.

Large pictures and animation can make the page slow to load.

Show an example page: http://www.oocities.org/rick_clements/tm.htm This is our club page and is an example.  This page has been around for several years.  It started with the list of benefits.  The map was added later.  Recently, I added the interactive driving directions.

Where to Create Your Page
Clubs won't need many of the features that come with a for pay web host.

Tools to Create Your Site

  • Site provided tools
  • Word
  • Netscape
  • Front Page
  • Write it yourself in HTML

Site Provided Page Builders

  • Simplest
  • Fill in the blank
  • No need to up load
  • You're on line
Note that on line means you may be tying up your only phone line depending on how you access the Internet.

Microsoft Word (or Similar)

  • Many people have it
  • Like creating any other document
  • Save as HTML
  • My not look exactly like you intended
  • Older version of Word easier to up load
The newer versions create a lot of files.  It's harder to determine what needs to be uploaded.  The publish feature works if you can write to your web server like you word write to a local file.

Netscape Composer

  • Free
  • Like using a word processor
  • Easy to up load
This works regardless of if you are on the PC, Mac, UNIX or Linix.

Front Page

  • More learning curve
  • Front Page Extensions
    • Easier to add some features
    • Server has to support them
  • More work to upload
    • More files
    • Server must support subdirectories
Same issue with uploading files as newer versions of Word.  I decided it was too much work for the benefit.

There are other, similar tools.  I don't have any experience with them.

Hand Generated HTML

  • This is programming
  • Most flexible
  • It no longer the only way

Getting Your Page Noticed
At minimum, list your sites with site with International and the district.  See one page handout on the Toastmaster Web Page Policy for information on how to submit your club's web site.

Meta tags are needed to be listed by most search engines.  Unfortunately, most tools don't do a good job of letting you create the meta tags.  The metatag.htm link will allow you to create the tags and paste them into your page.

Meta Tags

<html> <head> 
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> 
<title>Daylighters Toastmasters Home Page</title> 
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="Toastmasters, Public speaking, Oral Communication, Beaverton, OR"> 
<META NAME="author" CONTENT="Rick Clements"> 
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Information on the Daylighters Toastmasters Club and Toastmasters in general.  Daylighers meet at
 6:40AM on Wednesday in Beaverton, OR"> 
<META NAME="Robots" CONTENT="All"> 
</head><body>
The tags are pasted into the header of your document.  This part isn't seen by people reading your page.  You can use an editor like notepad or some programs line Word and Netscape provide a method to access the raw html. 

There will be information in the header that can be ignored.  You want to paste the keywords, description and robots tags into the header.

Summary

  • Know your purpose
  • Keep it simple
  • Variety of tools
  • Free and paid host sites
  • List with International and District
  • Can list with search engines

Handed out copy of Toastmasters International Web Policy from http://www.toastmasters.org/guides.htm

(Toastmasters International logo)Ideas for Toastmasters.  A collection of meeting ideas, ideas for officers and speech ideas.

(house) Rick's home page with indexwithout index

The names "Toastmasters International", "Toastmasters," and the Toastmasters International emblem are trademarks protected in the United States, Canada, and other countries where Toastmasters Clubs exist.  Unauthorized use is prohibited.

Last update:  $Date: 2001/07/28 19:08:42 $ GMT