TOPIC:

I am about to roll out my club website on FTH2. Thanks to the forum discussions etc, I have been able to set it all up. The site is in my sig. Also

Hilo Toastmastersclubs

I would appreciate any opinions you might have and/or suggestions. I am a newbie at web development but not afraid of writing HTML source if needed. In fact I would prefer writing in source code than WYSIWIG.

Thanks in advance.

I like the slide show a *lot*.

You can edit source in any editor box via clicking the Source button in the upper left of the editor toolbar.

I recommend that you select your club contacts (Email and Contact Forms) so that the Contact Us form is enabled.

Steve -- Thank you for your kind words and suggestion. I *stole* the idea for the slideshow possibly from one of your posts .

I have been using the source button a lot. Are there any additional things one can do with the source code that would not be possible with WYSIWIG?

I am planning to first give a demo of the site to the Club Officers and then Roll it out to the general membership. At this moment, I expect that the agenda feature will not be much used. There is lots of emailing back and forth. I am just planning to have the most current agenda in a link accessible to members only. It will just be a simple html list or table.

Question: How would you motivate all of the members to sign up and use the site regularly to check on club activities etc.?

I recommend learning how to use the agenda and eventually phasing it in if you can. (not right away... get used to the system first) It is a huge timesaver.

I would recommend that you strive to have the website work as a service for your club that does not depend on members logging in. In other words, strive to have it provide what is needed regardless of whether people sign in or not. For example, one of the benefits of the agenda system is that the VPE can just email out the agenda to club members--they do not need to ever sign in to see the agenda if the VPE is doing that. Thinking carefully about how the FTH email addresses are used can be a big help in this regard. Also, thinking carefully about what is in the public downloads area vs the members only downloads area is also useful in this regards--files containing meeting forms can be public, for example.

What you can do is to provide some added benefits that are exclusive to members only to encourage them to log in. You will have to regularly promote those benefits, though. For example, if you are using the agenda system, members can sign up for roles online. However, that benefit must be regularly promoted for it to get much use.

Steve -- You are correct. The agenda feature seems pretty good. I'm playing with it. I have a vested interest as I'm the VP of Ed as well.

The key to being effective with the agendas is learning how to prepare reusable agenda templates and create agendas from the templates. Creating agenda templates is not much different than creating agendas, but understanding the relationship between the two and what to expect is important to being effective with the online agendas. As a specific example, making changes to a template does *not* cause those changes to ripple through any agendas created from the template. Many people miss that at the beginning--the two are distinct and the template just serves as a common starting place for agendas. Once the agenda is actually created from the template, it is independent of the template.

The templates seem perfect for our situation. We have two sets of Meetings -- 1) Every Tuesday at noon and 2) First and Third Thursday. In addition, we have two sets of agendas -- either 2 speakers or 4 speakers. Thus a total of 4 agenda templates.

I am now more enthused about it. I hope that by the beginning of next year, I can transition to using the FTH agenda features.

Feel free to come back here to ask questions at any time. We are here to help.

May I close out this thread?

Just one question. Is it possible to just print the agendas without the times?
Thanks.

Yes, there is a setting to turn them off for the printed agendas:
support.toastmastersclubs.org/doc/item/agenda-default-settings

I suggest you get familiar with our online docs... lots of good info there.

Thanks. I was looking there to see if I could turn it off for emailed agendas.

ramprao wrote:

Thanks. I was looking there to see if I could turn it off for emailed agendas.

I don't think so at this time. If you want that, I would suggest posting an improvement suggestion in that forum section.

Thank you. I will post there as you suggest. You may close this thread.