 | Getting Started
| Benefits
| Content
| Cost
| Choosing a Developer
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| Choosing a Host Site
| Development Tools
| Building the Pages
| Resources
| Summary
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You've noticed a lot of Non-Profit Clubs are taking
advantage of the Internet with their own web pages, and since your
club doesn't have one, you've decided they should. We have seen a
lot of club web pages and have also built a few. In doing so have we have
learned a few things that we'd like to pass on to you, in the hopes it will help
your club end up with a site that's professional and desirable to visit.
Index
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First , what is the purpose of having a web page for your club? If you were to build a site for your club, what do you expect it to accomplish? Knowing that will help you decide what your site needs to contain and, most importantly, provide you with ready answers when you try to convince other members of the club that having a web page is beneficial for them.
Primary among the benefits of a club or organization having a page on the net is: letting the world know your club exists. It is often your club's first introduction to prospective members or visitors in your area or region. It can lead to new memberships - we have seen it happen first hand! It can also serve as a catalyst to the activities and operation of your group by disseminating information to on-line members. It can let both existing and potential members know the current when's and where's of your club's events and meetings. Keep in mind that this isn't the local newspaper media you're dealing with here; it's world-wide and immediate. Your club can decide to have an event and immediately announce it to the world with no concern for publishing lead times.
How many members in your organization are already on the net, especially club officers? That can make a huge difference in the value of a club web page and in the support you'll get in establishing one. You'll usually find a few members on, and maybe some of the officers. No doubt they may have heard about the net, usually something they read in the newspaper (not good!). Be prepared to become the club guru in assisting them to get on-line... it will happen eventually. Showing them a list of all the other clubs and vendors who are on line will help sell it. You may even find a club member who has the capability to build the site, but has not been inspired to do so.
Your club's web page can be as large or as complex as you want it to be. That will driven largely by it's purpose; is it just out there to just say hello or does it contain useful information about your club and its activities. At a minimum, you should consider a page for each of the following:
| Home Page - Introductory, with club name, club seal, city state location,
and club affiliations (AMA Charter #, SFA, IMAA, IMAC, etc.). Keep this page
short and quick to load. Have links to the rest of the HTML pages at the club's site.
| About Page - A page that tells the world about the club; when
it was established, maybe some history, what the primary interests are,
officers, dues structure, meeting dates, possibly a membership form. Include
the e-mail address of any club officers or their telephone numbers (with their
permission, of course - this is much different from a posting in your club
newsletter!)
| Location Page - To lead prospective members to your club house
or flying field. It may contain directions and a map showing
how to get there. Be careful about map image file sizes; often
it's best to create a thumbnail and link to the larger image if someone
decides to use the map to get there. Scanning a color area map
and annotating the graphic is nice, but even a black-and-white
sketch can do.
| Events Page - A calendar of club meeting and event dates.
This can be an important page and needs to be kept current.
An HTML Table can help display this quite nicely.
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| Photo Album - This can take up as much space on the server as
all the rest of your site. If you do create one, don't put all the full size
images on one page - put smaller thumbnails and link them to the
larger images. Your viewing audience will thank you - don't force photos
on viewers they may not be interested in seeing. Be considerate to the
owner of the photo - give the person the photo credit if you can. Also,
make SURE you have the aircraft owners name - and mention it.
| Your Newsletter - if you have a nice newsletter, publish it. Make
it available for exchange with other newsletter editors. Be aware that
this can result in a lot of maintenance and be prepared to deal with it.
| Links Page - It's amazing the number of sites that claim they are
or intend to be the best link resource on the net. Don't kid yourself,
it will be an impossible task with a huge amount of maintenance to
keep it updated. Unless you are prepared for this, keep it relatively
short (and accurate) with links that relate to the interests of your club.
Examples: AMA, IMAA, IMAC, etc. - This way a new prospective
member can get more information on what your membership is
most interested in. We recommend you pick a few of your favorite
R/C link resources to put on your club's page, and let those sites
handle something most of them are already doing very well.
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The cost-benefit ratio is the first thing the administration of a club will want to know. If the per-month cost is $2.00 or $200.00, what's the payback? Admit it: it's mostly intangible. You may never be able to count the number of new members a web page brought into the club, nor how many people showed up at an event as a result of one - but you can be certain they will! Again, we have seen this happen first hand.
The developer can be yourself, the neighborhood computer geek, a computer wise club member or a professional web developer. This has a significant impact on the start up expense and site quality. In some cases, you may be better off with a club member who knows what your club is about versus a professional developer who doesn't have a clue. Then there are ongoing maintenance and hosting fees.
This selection is an extremely important consideration, depending on whether you intend the club's site to be dynamic or static and how long you want the site to exist. If you or another club member create it, are you going to be around a year or two from now, and still be interested in maintaining it? If it's important for the club to have a club site now, will it still be true in two years?
You should never consider developing a club site on an Internet Service Provider's (ISP) server that has a miserable band-width access to the Internet. (Some of the major services are currently having this problem even with their vast resources - you may be better off with one of the smaller ISPs). You've no doubt seen it yourself. It takes so long to get a response from the server that you give up and move on. Right there, you loose the primary reason for developing the site in first place. Also consider the Internet address your club site will have with each ISP you are reviewing. Try not to have an address sixty characters long, including special characters, that nobody in the world has time or dexterity to type in, even if just once.
You may not realize it, but the ISP you are currently using for your Internet access may provide free web space for a personal or non profit organization. There are valid reasons you may not want to take advantage of this. The primary one is that it will hamper your freedom of choice in the selection of your own ISP. Take our word for it, moving a site is definitely not fun. Aside from possibly having to retag links in the HTML documents, there are all those other links all over the network that will have to be notified and changed. You should have a notice on the old site for a while to redirect visitors to the new location. This obviously means two ISP payments during this time period. Another reason is that "free" web page may be just that: a single, very generic page.
Whether in your space or club space, and depending on the features you want your site to include, consider asking the following questions:
| Does your ISP provide on-line storage, and if so, how much and
are there additional costs?
| Does the ISP offer access to the CGI directories so that you can
utilize PERL-language scripts-based HTML forms and access counters?
| Is there something you want your pages to do that would
require server side includes?
| If important to you, can your ISP provide you with information
from the access logs so that you can see who's
visiting your site?
| What resources do you have available on the server side to do
uploads and setting file permissions? Can you do this or will the ISP charge
you to do it for you? Are correct file permissions set automatically?
| What Operating System is your ISP using? Can you manage the
things you need to do in that environment?
| Will they accept FTP and Telnet sessions? What are their procedures
for allowing you to update your site?
| If your organization decides it wants it's own unique Internet address,
(http://www.yourclub.org) can your ISP provide a virtual server and address?
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We have already mentioned server-side tools, but what tools will you need to build and maintain a set of web pages on the net? These can range from extremely simple to major-multi-complex sets of software running on your home machine.
Typically, you need the following to create a respectable set of web pages. There are a lot of variances in the selections, mostly personal preferences. We will tell you where to get some of these later.
| Text: A web page is not much more than an ASCII file with
HTML codes to perform formatting and linking to other pages. You probably
already have Windows Notepad. If you learn HTML code, you can create
your web site with an application as simple as that - but we don't recommend
that you try. Get one of the HTML editors which will generate the code for
you and learn how to use it.
Graphics: You'll probably want to include at least a few
graphics, and you'll need an application to generate images in
the GIF or JPEG format. If you are really into it, you may consider
using the Corel suite, Micrografx Picture Publisher, or possibly
Adobe Photoshop. Be aware that these can get expensive, and may
require more computer resource than you have available. There
are as many of these commercially available applications around
as there are word processors; probably more.
| A less expensive solution and very capable, is Paint Shop Pro®, which is a shareware image application, and it is available for download on the Internet. You'll want to be able to make your GIFs transparent so that you can seamlessly lay them on your backgrounds. Many of the web-smart graphics applications can do this now. The GIF Construction Set by Alchemy Mindworks®, available at their web site, can also handle that for you very nicely, and will in addition provide the ability to do automated GIFs.
Scanner: If you're preparing graphics or photos for your
club's site, it's very difficult to do without a scanner. You can do it with
a hand scanner, but a far better choice is a flatbed. Prices on high
quality scanners have dropped to very low prices in the last year.
You don't need to over-spend on this. Remember that what you're
trying to present will be displayed on screens with a resolution that
doesn't even come close to what the cheapest of scanners can achieve.
| As an alternative, you can probably find someone locally to scan the photos for you - consider having the club get one to be used both for your web site and also to put photos in your club newsletter!
Communications: Most folks don't build their web page documents
directly on the host server. You'll need the means to create your
web page material locally and transfer it up to your club's host.
Expect to need something that provides you with FTP and Telnet
to the server. Utilities for this are available on the Internet if your ISP does
not provide them.
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Web Browsers: They are NOT equal. We mention them here
because unless you have them all, you won't know what your creation
will look like to someone using a different browser than you use.
| What looks good with one browser can look terrible (and embarrassing) on another if you are not careful! Netscape has long been in the lead in developing new capability, in particular tables and forms. Internet Explorer has caught up very nicely. But many of the large network providers have their own versions of browsers, and often they are crippled or worse. The situation has improved somewhat over the past year. The point is to be aware of the differences, and try to work around them if you can. Multimedia complicates the situation even more with so many unique browser plugins to choose from. |
| Structuring The Site: How you set up directory and file
structures on the web server can make a big difference in how
easy it will be to maintain. Each web site is unique in this regard,
but usually you have a top level directory that's called by the
web server in response to a browser request. It's nice to set
it up so that visitors only have to enter the host and directory
name to bring up the home page. This is done by naming the home
(first) page "index.html" and having your ISP index
that directory on the web server. You may want to keep a common
directory for all images, and possibly have a directory for each
general subject area your site offers. Don't get too complex with
directories; it makes linking your pages together more difficult.
Don't forget security; set those directory and file permissions
properly! This is important - we have seen one site hacked to pieces
because file permissions were not set correctly. Check with your ISP
and make sure it is done!
Page Sizes: DO NOT try to put your club's
entire web page into a single HTML document. Keep the first page
short! It should be appealing, but don't load it down with big
graphics/images displays. Use document links to continue the visitor
into other areas of your site. This is the most common mistake
we see on the web. Remember, that visitor can't load those pages
across the net as fast as you can locally, and you don't want
them to give up seeing your site because it takes forever to get
the first page displayed.
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Graphics/Images: We'll use the term images to refer to
both graphic images and photo images. In both cases, they are
a file of bits, almost always compressed. It is important to watch
that your image sizes aren't so large that they take forever to
download. If you see your images are greater than 20Kb, you might
start to consider using a thumbnail for a linked image, or reduce
it the best you can. The JPEG compression can do an excellent job
of getting image file sizes down, but it doesn't yet do the transparencies.
The GIF compression does do transparencies and quality is usually
very good, but image file sizes tend to be large. As a general rule, we
have found the GIF format best for logos, clip art, etc. and JPG best
for reproduction of photographs.
. | When you format your page to include an image, make SURE you use the height and width attributes. This usually assures that the browser will reserve space for the image within the text, and will allow the text to appear to your visitor before the images finish loading. At least they will have some text to read while waiting!
Automated GIFs: We mention these here because they're in vogue
on the net now. These are a series of GIF images called in sequence
to appear in motion on your display. They can really enhance a
page's appearance or they can make it so busy and slow that they
seriously detract from your message. We think it considerate if
a site doesn't use more than one or two per page, and try to keep them
small. We have seen some otherwise nicely done pages (in our opinion)
degraded because of the overuse of these automated GIFS. It is even
worse, in our opinion, when most of them are just taken from another web
site - what's the point? It shows you can download and upload files, not
that you can create original or unique graphics -- most knowledgeable visitors
would not be very impressed!
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Backgrounds: Backgrounds on your pages can make them much
more appealing to the eye, or they can be downright offensive.
There's no pat answer for the right background to use, you just
have to experiment. Try to keep the image file for the background
as small as you can. There are gobs of examples out on the net,
mostly stolen from someplace else. Don't put dark blue letters on a black
background, or yellow letters on a white background. (We have seen
more than one home page where we couldn't read the text very well - so
guess how long we visited there!)
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Fonts: You won't have much control over what fonts appear
on your visitor's browser. You can control size and some basic
features such as underlines, italics, bold and color, but the freedom-to-choose
reins in the case of fonts. If you specify a certain font, be aware that the user
may not have it installed, and their browser will substitute something - end
result - you have no idea what your page will look like to them!
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Multimedia: With so many different standards floating around today,
this can turn into a quagmire. If you do decide to get into this, make sure you know
what you are doing. Don't force a 600k to 1 meg. audio file download on a visitor,
unless they ask for it--make it an option.
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Frames: This little piece of browser techno-whiz can be quite
useful if you have a need to keep static displays up while updating
different elements on the viewer's screen. They can also eat up screen
real estate, cause confusion for the user, and their implementation was
not all that well done. They can cause really strange browser effects;
like getting into frames and not being able to get out, or multiple
browsers popping up. Unless you really need them or you're prepared
to spend time banging at the code, we'd suggest you keep
things simple. You can get some of the same affects using tables,
and get more restful sleep at night.
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Gadgets: A number of features you'll see on web pages depend
on CGI scripts. These are processes that run on the server and
are called from your HTML document. Many host sites do not allow
users into the CGI directory, but do allow them to call routines
they have stored there. You need to know what's available.
| One of the most popular is the access counter. We like access counters. We're not sure anyone else does, or if a visitor to one of our sites really cares. Sometimes, if the number is big, you might get the impression you've found a really good site; someplace everyone on the net is visiting. Be aware that you can initialize the counter to any number and we have found they often don't count just visits but page accesses, which can multiply the number out of proportion. The response time at some sites is slow enough that the visitor never gets counted. And remember, they count you too. They're not certifiably accurate, but they are an indicator. If you intend to include forms or mail link tags in your documents, you need to know what CGI scripts are available. They can serve to encourage visitor communication with your organization, and you want to be able to use them. |
| Publications:The best advice we can give you here is to visit your local
bookstore. Plan to spend some time browsing - there are an unbelievable number
of books available, many with a CD or floppy with example code and shareware
to help you get started. Be aware - because of the lag time in publishing dates, even
a new publication may contain outdated material, especially home page URLs of
the authors. You can sometimes find newer material at the author's home page than
is contained on the CDs and floppies.
A word about shareware authors and their products: We have been there, done that. Some of the following URLs contain more shareware than you will ever be able to evaluate or use. If you download a piece of shareware and decide to use it - REGISTER IT! - in most cases the cost is reasonable and many cases better than what you can obtain commercially. We have no connection with any of the listed sites, other than we use registered shareware and find it very functional. The following URL's were checked for accuracy on November 30th, 1999.
Additional HTML References:
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Shareware and Freeware:
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Getting your New Site Advertised:
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We hope we've been able to provide you with some sage advice about building club pages and some of the pitfalls to avoid. It is in no way meant to be all inclusive. There are topics we have not covered, such as JAVA, and multimedia - audio, video, etc. - we may go into more depth in the future.
If this document inspires a few clubs to join us on the net, or helps current ones to improve their site, then it has accomplished its purpose.
