TOPIC:

dakota.toastmastersclubs.org/

We have been around for many years, I am the current Club President, but I am also the most technical/computer/web literate, many years as web programmer.

I have been tweakng our site design and content, but trying to find the balsnce of useful, easy to read content, and not overwhelm visitors with too much information or content.

Please give me any feedback, I want to make it better.

Thank you for your time.

Hi Craig,

You have a good basic site, but there is certainly room for improvement.

First, a bit more text would be helpful; think of some more things to say about how people might benefit from what Toastmasters offers. Think back to the questions you hear a lot from visitors, and answer the most common ones right on the website.

Second, edit all the txt, maybe get some help from the best writer in the club. There are several errors, including sentence fragments, uneven punctuation & spacing and grammar errors. While some people don't care about these things, they are turn-offs to others, and may be costing you visitors.

Also, add some text specifically to do better on internet searches. Try this experiment - since your club is in Apple Valley, search on just the word
Toastmasters
while you are in Apple Valley - or search on
Toastmasters Apple Valley

These are the kinds of terms that prospects use to search for a club to visit. If your club isn't in the first few results, you're missing out on visitors. To improve it, sprinkle references to Apple Valley and nearby cities into the text, not only on the home page, but other pages. Two, three, even four occurences per page will help with search results.
Also, try to get links to your club website from ther places - a Google listing, Bing listing, Facebook, etc etc all help.

Thank you.

Yes, I will work on checking the grammar of the text.

The problem is the text in the past was way too wordy, and most people don't read huge paragraphs unless it's something they absolutely must know or have to know.

So I was trying to simplifty, and highlight the key points.

I was considering trying to change the color scheme a bit, using one of the various color palette tools out there. But need to stick with in the Toastmaster color scheme?

SEO can be very tricky, because if you over-stuff keywords, search engine's can also detect that.

But location information can't hurt.

BTW, can the according content be disabled or changed in the ui in any way?

Thank you again.

Sentence style should be short, and easily scanned without really reading - to match how we all read websites

The color choices are limited to the Toastmaster colro options (plus some text color choices). This is to reinforce the Toasmaster branding.

About the SEO: keyword stuffing is an issue if you get carried away I would use the same location word/phrase no more than 3-4 times per page. I have found that using the words (like your location) in sentences works, but just adding them in a list doesn't really help.

I'm not a fan of the accordian section, because it appears on so many club websites. Turn it off in in the Appearance tab, by checking the Detault TM Information panes box.

There are two references to Accordion.

In how the menu is laid out, and in reference to the accordion-ized content below the editable home page content.

I was referring to eliminating the accordion content below the home page.

And thank you for your time.