Creating Your Lions Club Webpage - the Steps
[ Webmaster | Server | Design | Create It! | Proof & Publish | Maintainance ]
1. Select your webmaster
This is often someone with webspace but it doesn't have to be (see the section on locating a server).
The club webmaster needs to be willing to put the time and effort into it; and to have the time.
If the webmaster is new to webpages, he or she needs to be enthusiastic and willing to learn.
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2. Locate a server - there are several options
Beg! You can contact the local servers in your area and ask for a public service donation of server space
Locate your site on Lions International e-Clubhouse free server e-Clubhouse
or you can subscribe to a paid server such as GoDaddy.com or A Small Orange these site provide advertisement free web site hosting. The drawback to using these servers is that you must have your own web design program such as CoffeeCup Visual Site Designer or Macromedia Dreamweaver. There are also web sites that provide FREE web design programs YOLA, WEBNODE, DOODLEKIT, and WEEBLY to name a few.
Put the site on a member's webspace - can be a problem if the club changes webmasters in the future but usually all this means is that you have to send out change of address notices for your new location.
Find out if your community has a section for civic or non-profit websites
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3. Design the website
If you want to use a template such as the one in this help section, you won't need some of this material at this time. If you're not interested in all the particulars of creating a page "from scratch", you can skip down to your section now. Later on, as you edit and modify the site, it will be important so why not familiarize yourself with it now!
Your Club’s Web Site: A Quality Public Relations Tool from Seminar at 84th Lions International Convention Indianapolis, IN., July 2-6, 2001. The Web can be one of your most powerful PR tools. You can: Inform a member who can not attend a meeting due to sickness or vacation or Save money on postage and printing. To download the seminar booklet click on the link.
Seminar Booklet - 171 kb
As time goes on, you may become quite comfortable creating or editing pages "on the fly" but at the beginning, it helps to work in sections.
It's very helpful to have links to areas of your home page, or to your other pages, at the beginning of the home page. That lets both new and repeat visitors go where they want. As you become more experienced in page design and see this type of layout on other pages, you might want to set up your page that way to.
The club may decide to include officers' names and e-mail addresses. Be careful not to give personal information and not to make any of your members uncomfortable.
Graphics
Pictures are very nice but it is better to keep them separate from the main body of your text because they can take a long time to load and some viewers have browsers that don't read them at all. Same thing with graphics. Make the page attractive for sure but don't get carried away with clever animation's or zillion-color backgrounds.
You can find graphics on other Lions Club pages as well as at LionNet and in several other archives listed on the LionNet Programs page.
Remember that these graphics are for use only by Lions and for Lions activities.
It's easy to download to your own computer a graphic you find on-line. For IBM computers, click your right mouse button on the image and select "save image as"; your browser will prompt you for the location to save the image and you can also change its name. For Mac computers, hold down the mouse button until the menu appears then select "save image as" and proceed as above. To select the background image to download, be sure the mouse isn't over another element.
Do's and don'ts
When someone enters your website, they want to see what's there. Do everything you can to make that first page load quickly. Do keep first page graphics to a minimum and try to avoid animation, sound and movies on the opening page. Do warn your visiters when a link goes to a page that takes a long time to load; if you ask them to be patient and tell them why, chances are they'll wait around for the page to load. Otherwise, they probably won't. Do remember that you're presenting an informational website for all web wanderers, whether they use graphics or not. As you learn more about web design, do pay particular attention to making your coding complete so that text readers (used by the blind) can "understand" the website. It is also important to remember that not everyone has the latest browser or capabilities for midi or sound. Some viewers will also have their graphics turned off so it's important that you don't forget to add the "alt" element to graphics.
Links
Add links upward in the Lions heirarchy, to the district, multi-district and Lions Clubs International . The link to LCI is the most important one one your website.
You can also add a link to LionNet if you want to provide your visitors with access to most of the online Lions clubs and activities in the world.
If your community has interesting or pertinent links, it is a good idea to include them in order to make your website interesting and different from all the others.
If some of your projects include organizations with websites, add links to those.
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4. Create it!
You've thought through what to include and how to organize your page. Now comes the actual creating of the page. There are several ways to do it. Beginners often choose one of the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) page creation computer programs. These make perfectly acceptable pages and, unless you get interested in HTML coding, may be all you'll ever need. Several of these applications offer evaluation or time limited versions for download from the Internet. A few are even free MS Office Live Small Business! Several other websites also offer such download opportunities: Tucows and WinFiles among them.The major browser suites, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer also have components for webpage design.
If your webmaster does invest in a program to make the page, the club should decide whether it wants to "own" the application or whether the webmaster is expected to donate the use of it to the club but continue private ownership. The programs can range from under $50 to well over $300 so this can be an important consideration if such a program is not already available to the webmaster.
Even if you're using a wysiwyg program, it is still important to keep accessibility in mind; just because the program doesn't "make" you insert alternative text for your graphics, for instance, doesn't mean you shouldn't do it! If you have webpage experience, keep in mind the content material of this help site and go to it!
For those of you using the template, save it to your hard drive, using your File menu and selecting "save as". Then you can bring the page up in a word processor, note pad, or other editing program and substitute in your club's information. The most important sections are the where and when of meetings and the Lions links. If, to get the page up quickly, you want to skip the history, community and projects sections and the other links, that's fine. Those sections can be added at a later time.
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5. Proof and Publish It
First proof it yourself, on your computer. Make sure the internal links work and that the graphics load. One pitfall of the wysiwyg programs is that they tend to link graphics to the local machine and not the server. If you have trouble with this, it's best to consult the Information Technology Chairman or another Internet expert.
To upload your files to the server, you will either use the servers own loader programs (available on some commercial servers and all of the free ones) or a file transfer protocol (FTP) program. Such free programs are FileZilla and Fling. They are generally self-explanatory but you should feel free to ask your expert support people for help getting started if you're a bit confused.
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6. Maintain It
It's very disappointing to visit a website with out of date material and this is particularly important for Lions Club websites. At the very least, maintain the current meeting time and location and, if you list officers, keep them current.
It's also nice to redesign your site ocassionally, especially as you learn more about the business at hand.
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If you need more help, please contact the District Information Technology Chairman
