District 1090

Central Southern England

Technical Tips

Increasing use of new technologies in Rotary brings with it considerations of presentation and communication that previously did not exist. This page is included to give Clubs guidelines about the use of these technologies and hopefully enhance your online experience and effectiveness.

Club Web Site Design

There are two distinct kinds of Club Web Site in District 1090, the first is a multi page, comprehensive arrangement designed to act as a centre of information, supporting Inner Wheel and Rotaract in addition to Rotary. Other Clubs have opted for a single page arrangement intended purely as a means of announcing their presence in the area, to publicise their activities and to attract new members. But whichever style a Club chooses there are certain basic parameters that the web designer should incorporate to ensure that a visit to the site is both pleasing and memorable.

First impressions are very important, especially to any non-Rotary visitors who have decided to find out more about Rotary in their area; the Home page should therefore:

	Be welcoming – Use a light open style of writing and if possible include the word welcome in the opening sentence of the first paragraph. Make it clear that your site is open to Rotarians and non-Rotarians alike, with a specific invitation to  non-Rotarians to come in and have a look around.
	Provide an incentive to look further – Pay attention to layout and colour scheme, being sparing with use of animations and graphics. If your site looks muddled or dull and is taking an age to download your visitors will soon get fed up and leave.
	Reflect your Club – Try to bias the site presentation and content to reflect the character of your Club. This does not mean to say that you should be overly flippant or unduly serious, but try to give the visitor a flavour of what they can expect if they do come along to a meeting.

Give some basic information about your Club on the Home page:

	Club name and District - Include an indication of where in the country your Club is located. Remember that some of the visitors to your site might be from out of the area or from abroad so may need confirmation that you meet near their hotel or place of work.
	Venue and meeting details - If possible provide a link to an online location map and add driving directions for that final kilometer or so to your venue.
	Charter date and size - This will give your visitor some idea of how long the Club has been in existence and whether or not the size of the Club will suit them. Some people prefer small groups, others like a crowd!
	Events and activity - This is of interest to other Rotarians who are thinking of dropping by for a visit as well as prospective members who need to understand what Rotary does. You do not need to amass a long list, just include a representative example of your Club’s main activities or your President's charity for the year.
	Contact information - Include a means of contacting the Club, by phone, email or a separate feedback form. You have welcomed your visitor to your virtual Club, now make it easy for them to express an interest in coming along to see you.
	Site updated  - Include a footnote on the Home page saying something like Site last updated 31 Oct 2005  providing the date when the site was last updated, and then keep it updated!

Include navigation buttons or links on every page, and avoid menus that straddle the top, sides and content of your pages simultaneously. By all means include links within your text to clarify or explain a Rotary term or reference to a charity, but for page to page navigation ensure that your menus are simple,  unambiguous, and always in the same position on every page. If you want to link your Club pages to other sites then bear in mind that each link is a point of maintenance for your webmaster; sites do go down or move! So think twice about the relevance of your links, then organise them by headings such as Rotary, Local Links, Charities and so on to make them easier to find.

Do not forget that in the eyes or your visitors your web site also reflects the commitment of your Club, so:

	Keep your site up to date - Even if it is a simple one page arrangement, have your webmaster make an update to your site every month or two even if that update is just to change the last modified date.
	Do not show - Any pages that are under construction or still in development, instead just exclude the relevant pages from your navigation until they are ready.

And finally:

	Images - If you use graphics within your pages, keep them as small as possible, use the jpg format for photographs and gif for graphics.
	Visit counters - These are of limited value as they also increment every time a visitor passes through the Home page on their way around the site, when the page is refreshed, and when you visit the page to check an update or change. However, by all means include them for short periods of time if you want to get some idea of how well your site is used by visitors or your Club.

If you follow the above guidelines you will have a Club web site that not only looks good but also functions as a shop window for your Club and another channel to finding new members. You may also want to include your URL in press releases, in which case you should consider having links to external pages explaining Rotary and its key programmes such as Polio Eradication. Remember that an effective web site does not need to be a huge encyclopaedic affair with hundreds of animations and photographs. A well presented, single page site is often more effective and just as successful in explaining what Rotary in general, and your Club in particular, is all about.

Naming A Club Web Site

A Rotary Club web site may be considered to be a publication in the same way that any Rotary newsletter or guideline is a publication, we just substitute electrons for paper but the basic principles remain the same. So just as we title a newsletter by its content or relevance – e.g. Rotary Magazine, 1090 News and Views – so we should apply the same thinking to a Club domain name. For example the following URLs – Uniform Resource Locators, i.e. web site addresses - would not give any indication of location or District to a visitor looking for a Club in your area.

	www.rotaryclub.org
	www.rotaryvillage.org
	www.rotarians.org
	www.localrotaryclub.org

So how should a Club address its web site to ensure that the domain name – the piece of the URL between ‘www’ and ‘org’ - is directly relevant to the Club and its location?

The ideal solution is to register a domain name based on the Club’s name, and then either use the web space provided by the domain registrar, or use a service called ‘web forwarding’. This is where a simple URL such as www.rotarybicester.org points to a longer or less intuitive URL such as mysite.freeserve.com/rotarybicester  of a sponsoring or free web service provider. And as you can see from these two examples, you do not need to include the home page filename of your site if it starts with ‘index’, ‘default’ or ‘home’ and ends with ‘htm’ or ‘html’.

The name of your domain is of course down to individual Club choice, but in the interests of brevity and simplicity we recommend that you keep your URL as short as possible. Use your Club name by all means and, if that name is not too long, include ‘rotary’ to make it clear that the URL is pointing to a Rotary Club. Based on these guidelines the following are domain name forms that you might consider for your Club using existing 1090 Club web sites as examples: 

	www.rotaryascot.org
	www.readingmaidenerlegh.org
	www.heathrow-rotary.org.uk
	www.banburyrotaryclub.org.uk

Where the Club name would be too long then try to agree a shorter, abbreviated version. For example the URL of the Rotary Club of Gerrards Cross and Chalfont St Peter is www.gxrotary.org.uk.

Notice that these examples use the domain suffix of ‘org’ or ‘org.uk’ which most correctly describes a Rotary club, i.e. it is an organisation, not a company (co, co.uk. com), or a network entity (net, net.uk). Also note that the ‘org.uk’ version of a domain name is usually cheaper to register and underlines the fact that you are a UK based Rotary Club.

If you follow these guidelines you will have a Club site name that is not only meaningful to your visitors, but also easy to find, easily remembered and cheaper to register. However, should you need help with the naming, registration or implementation of your web site then contact the District 1090 Webmaster who will be pleased to help. Alternatively visit the RIBI web site tutorial which provides more information on how you can set up a Club web site using simple templates while also benefiting Rotary Foundation.