TOPIC:

I like ours: 154.toastmastersclubs.org/ - not so plain old blue and white.

Darlene,

I like the color combinations and layout. But. the first thing I see is the white background on the Club Mission Statement. It seems out of place with the rest of your formatting for me.

I like that your "mid-way banner" are buttons. Your conference button goes to last year's as well as mentioning last years International Convention.

I think some of your main page content could be linked to custom pages so that i don't have to keep scrolling.
The Attracting New members link seems out of place on the Main Menu. Maybe it should be in the Downloads.

The link to Region 1 is restricted, so I would remove it.

Darlene,

In order to continue to have this forum section be useful into the future, we need to request that everyone contribute to it.

Therefore, we are implementing "Get an evaluation, give an evaluation." . Basically, we are requesting those who have received a website evaluation give a Toastmasters style website evaluation for at least one other club that has requested an evaluation in this forum section. (You get to choose which club website to do the website evaluation for.) Just post your impressions: things you like about the website, and areas for improvement. Everyone has something to offer... just trust your instincts.

Hi Darlene!

The first thing that struck me was the use of BRIGHT yellow on your main menu. It hurts the eyes. Can you tone down the text font to a shade of yellow that is more... flat?

KUDOs on all of the original content! It shows you put in a lot of time, and really care about your club's image. However, there is a lot of it on the home page, and it runs long. People like to "click" instead of "scroll". When they surf, they want to feel in control, not as though they are being force-fed. You have enough for a second page.

I really like your "what we do" page. It helps dispel any false notions of who we are. I also love that you were (somehow) able to embed the Toastmasters meeting video at the bottom. I tried several times to embed that particular video into our site, and I kept getting a message that the author (Toastmasters) wouldn't allow embedding. Can you PM or email me on how you did that, please? This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Blaine Little, ACB
V.P. of PR, TM1757

My comments:

Likes

1. Home page - The photo and verbiage on certificate of Accomplishment

2. Home page - The CALENDAR CONFERENCES NEWSLETTERS links in the styled table.

3. Home page - The GIF slide show (of course).

4. Home page - Facebook and Twitter feeds

5. Google Map with Directions link

6. Contact Us form has phone numbers

7. Downloadable Newsletters

8. "What we do at our Toastmasters meetings" page. (This is also called A Typical Meeting page in other club websites.)

8b. About Us page.

Possible Opportunities for Improvement

9. I agree on the bright yellow text in the menu. A bit too bright for my eyes, also.

10. I suggest adding the Advisory Titles for the aforementioned links. Doing that provides useful pop-up tool tips for the links when you hover the mouse over them.

11. Your home page has a *lot* of information on it. I am not a big fan of long home pages, since most people will probably stop reading it after a certain point. Some of it is useful, like the district conference flyer, but is not specific to your club and could be moved to its own custom page, and just referenced via a link on the home page. Also, some of the content at the bottom that likely originated from FreeToastHost 1 (The Proven Way to become a better speaker) is essentially duplicated in the accordion panels at the bottom--you really don't need both.

12. umatillatoastmasters.weebly.com/ - I was expecting that this was a link, but it is not.

13. Meeting Info page. I do not understand why your officers are listed on this page--why not just put them on their own page and list that page in the menu? Also, I think it would be helpful to a first time meeting visitor if you put one of your meeting venue photos (City Hall) on the Meeting Info page.

14. Public Downloads - Maybe a virtual folder for Newsletters?

Overall, it is a great website, and you clearly show your technical savvy with it.

I like your web site.

+
My first impression is welcoming and of a club that has put effort into the site. This is not an "out-of-the-box" FTH site.

Love the newsletters! It seems this newsletter is published once annually. Stating so on the page would be helpful to this user.

MeetingInformation/Directions
Good directions for how to get to the meeting area.

About Us
I like this page. Good introduction to the club. Perhaps a photograph of the group in action would spice it up.

What We Do at Our Toastmaster Meetings
I really like this page. This is helpful to a visitor.

Some things to consider . . .
-
Caption of photograph on homepage states, "Celebrated 75 years of existence". Meh. Existence isn't thriving. Perhaps "celebrated its 75th anniversary" sounds more enticing.

Calendar link on homepage returned a calendar that had nothing on it for February. Unless there are a lot of extra events listed on the calendar, I would disable it. The information about the meetings is available elsewhere.

Homepage
I believe standard usage is to include a comma after a city and before the state (Pendleton Oregon)

I find there is too much information on the homepage. Since you have a link to your FB in the Social Media menu, I would lose the blurb about FB at the end of the homepage.

I like the Calendar|Conferences|Newsletters links in the body of the homepage. But seeing as though those links are repeated elsewhere save the conferences, perhaps it would be more help for the visitor's navigation to use the universal navigation menu on the left. That would free up some more homepage space too.

The What's In It for Me stuff is stuck at the bottom of a long homepage. Get that to the top where it will attract prospective members.

Meet Our Members
More introductions needed, imo.

About Us
membership information link is broken

Membership Information
A prospective member is asked to contact Bob, Fritz, Jim, Allen, and Darlene. There is no contact information in which to do so.

Your Twitter feed hasn't been updated in more than two months. The last LinkedIn discussion was seven months ago. There's only an introductory post on Google+. As a visitor that gives me the impression the club isn't active. I would lose those links until there is more to present your members and the public.

Conference Link
Provides information about the Fall conference. Looks like it would have been fun, but it is four months out of date.

The information about the spring conference with Conor Cunneen (very interesting man, fwiw) would work well here. That would also lighten the homepage.

You are advertising another club that is starting nearby. As a prospective member, I may be confused. This may be good information for your members, but I would not have it sit in the middle of the homepage.

Overall, I like the site. Re-organizing some of the material will serve the prospective member better, imo, and keep your good-looking web site cleaner in looks.

One other thing about your site: currently, it is is not displaying correctly with Chrome, although IE and Firefox show it OK.

GeorgeMarshall wrote:

One other thing about your site: currently, it is is not displaying correctly with Chrome

George, I can view it in Chrome just fine.

Now it displays in my Chrome too - another Chrome transient?

Apparently, Toastmasters is now allowing other sites to embed the video of which I was speaking.



It shows a demo meeting and really answers a lot of questions. I just added it to one of my custom pages I could not add to last year.

Blaine Little, ACB
VPPR, TM 1757

OK.. I'VE DONE A BUNCH OF UPDATES

After reading comments here, I have done some updates.

Perhaps new look-see might be in order.. I tried to make some of those changes suggested without loosing my personality on the page at the same time.

things I worked on
1. making background colors the same on all the pages
2. taking some stuff off the home page and making special pages for some of that info so that the home page wasn't quite as long
3. fixed some quirky fonts
4. eliminated a couple of pages that were either totally outdated or not working.
5. moved some stuff to the members only menu

Opinions always solicited.

thanks

Darlene

OK should have RE-TYPED the link so one doesn't have to go to the top of this forum post......

154.toastmastersclubs.org

oh and another change was that I toned down the yellow text in the menu .. since several folks complained that it was too overpowering.

Much better!

A few comments:

1. Suggest looking into setting the Advisory Titles for links in the Advanced tab of the editor's links dialog... It looks polished when you have those set, and helps users know what to expect when clicking links.

2. Suggest using the Facebook Activity feed plugin beside to your Twitter feed. developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins (You may need to do a 2 column 1 row table for that.) The Twitter feed is a bit narrow, so you could probably do both side by side.

3. Thanks for moving some of the Home Page content to supporting pages. One thing you can do is still reference that content via links in your home page if you feel it might be interesting to the website visitor. For example, you might add a link in your home page "Click Here to find out more why other have joined Toastmasters." (e.g., link to Why Join Toastmasters page.) By using strategic links that are interwoven in your home page text, this allows you to have an integrated website with supporting pages that are easy to get to with links that occur in the home page where they would be most convenient/intuitive for the viewer. You can also do a similar link with your Membership Information page, and references to District 9 in your home page.

Everything looks great. The above is just what I consider to be "polish".

Steve:

Couple of questions/statements

1. I am not sure what you mean by "advisory titles" - not a term I am familiar with.
2. The FB app is already there.. but I've noticed every time I go to the page I have to Ctrl-F5 the page in order for it to show up. Do you know what might be causing that? I was wondering if it was doing that to other viewers too. Obviously so.

When I have some extra time (yeah, right) I'll do some of the intuitive things you mentioned.. I spend enough time today tweaking.

Darlene

Advisory Titles for links (scroll down for rest of post):



Try setting this for one of your links, saving it, and seeing what happens when you hover your mouse over the link. See what I mean? It is the same behavior as when you hover your mouse over the Submit button for a forum post. (Typically, you don't need to put "Click here to submit" on the button, you would use the Advisory Title for that.) The Advisory Titles are essentially the pop-up help "tips" for links. In the HTML world, the Advisory Titles are how this is done.

As I noted in my prior post, though, this is "polish"... Not absolutely necessary, but I figured you might want to know about it.

morrowcoteacher wrote:

2. The FB app is already there.. but I've noticed every time I go to the page I have to Ctrl-F5 the page in order for it to show up. Do you know what might be causing that? I was wondering if it was doing that to other viewers too. Obviously so.
Darlene

I think you should use the iframe version.

the like box is the only one that seems to work for me..
the activity box keeps saying there is no activity and if I try the iframe, it says my link is invalid.

the like box does work though... just not consistently and not on every browser - works most on chrome

(I haven't even looked at it on ie.. don't use ie hardly at all, it always crashes )

morrowcoteacher wrote:

the like box is the only one that seems to work for me..
the activity box keeps saying there is no activity and if I try the iframe, it says my link is invalid.

the like box does work though... just not consistently and not on every browser - works most on chrome

(I haven't even looked at it on ie.. don't use ie hardly at all, it always crashes )

Typically, the key is getting the correct URL to use.

Ok, you are correct, I think the like box is the one to use. For some reason, I was thinking that was the activity feed. In any case, I would recommend using the iframe version of that. What you are using now requires a script, probably to do the updates between screen refreshes.

oh yeah..... I actually think I got it.. the iframe that is.. I had to go to a different place than I originally was going to to make it.

developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/like-box-for-pages is what let me use the iframe. the link you sent said I didn't have a valid url.. (used the same url for both tries.. so who knows.. ) but anyway it seems to be working

oh and btw.. I added some of those "advisory titles" (not to everything but some)

thanks for the help..

hopefully it helps someone else if they are having the same issues.. and now I know what to do too.

I need to get more active here.. I read most everything but don't always respond because you guys are way faster than I am at getting on here.

and I am still learning lots too... love it though.

morrowcoteacher wrote:

I need to get more active here.. I read most everything but don't always respond because you guys are way faster than I am at getting on here.

You are always welcome to contribute. As we are now have the website evaluations section going, I think there will be plenty of opportunities to contribute.