TOPIC:

Evaluations please! midwaytm.toastmastersclubs.org/

Thank you in advance.

I like your club website a lot. Of note:

1. Your use of color is very pleasant and appealing.
2. Love the photo montage on the home page. Excellent!
3. Next meeting blurb on home page is great.
4. Facebook widget on home page is great.
5. Your Meeting Info/Directions page is one of the best ones I have ever seen. I do not think I would get lost finding your meeting.
6. You have some phone numbers on Contact Us. good
7. Have officers and bios on M.O.M. page. good (MOM would be proud of your M.O.M. page--lol)
8. Interesting how you have your Meeting Themes on your club calendar. nice
9. Newsletter link works. good!
10. Meeting agendas look great.

Only things I can think of to experiment with:
1. The text at the top of the home page is a bit bland. (font, font color, etc.) I see that you do mix up the fonts and font colors on other pages a bit. Remember that your Home Page is what people see first, particularly what is "above the fold" (look up the expression).

2. Your photo montage on your home page is great, but as a visitor I do not know whether the photos are recent or not. One thing that I have seen works well for websites is some sort of highlight of a recent member just joined (did their icebreaker) or recent member accomplishment (completed a level). These sorts of recent highlights show that your club is currently very active and that current members are accomplishing their goals *now*--that is very attractive to potential new members. This sort of thing does require some regular updates to be effective, so keep that in mind if you choose to experiment with it. If you start doing, but then don't keep it up, having a highlight on your website from a year ago could create a bad impression.

This is a very nice site; you've clearly put a lot of thought into it. While I will intersperse suggestions in this evaluation, I'll be mostly having to find concise ways to point out all the things you've done well.

As a visitor looking to find out about you, my very first glance at your home page immediately addresses my biggest two questions:
1) What can you do for me?
2) Do you fit into my personal schedule?

It's right there: clear and concise. You also begin to answer an objection that some prospective visitors may answer: the apparent driving distance. You continue this very effectively on your "Why Drive to Midway" page. You put it in compelling numbers, and add a very inviting description of your club meetings.

You might consider a slight addition in the home page, under "Drive a Little. Grow a Lot." There are many prospective members who may only have a vague idea of what Toastmasters is. More than a few actually picture us sitting around a table proposing toasts. (And because we're "Masters," we must be very good at proposing toasts.) You speak of growing, sharing and connecting: all good. Yet these are vague and abstract to someone who's never experienced Toastmasters. Add a few details about what they'll do as Toastmasters: speaking, being evaluated, supporting others, learning to lead, etc.

Your description showcases you as a very people-oriented club, and it's important to show that when you can offer it, but adding details about speaking, leading, evaluating, and such are also important to make you come up in a Google search, when someone is looking to learn those things but doesn't know what Toastmasters is. These words will help you appear in the search results, anyway.

Breaking your home page into two columns makes it visually interesting, but the way you've done it appears to have an unwanted side effect. FreeToastHost is now mobile responsive; it reformats itself so it can be read easily on a phone. Unfortunately, your home page doesn't reformat on my phone. I suspect it's from the one continuous line that includes your newsletter signup offer. The tables you've set up to make columns elsewhere don't appear able to reformat around that single wide element.

I'm just guessing at the cause here, but it might be worth investigating the page layout, perhaps by playing with the layout on a separate page that you make just for test purposes, and finding a layout method that satisfies both your aesthetics, and your phone's.

The weekly newsletter and option to sign up for it is dynamite! The link to separate, non-FTH web pages with mailchimp is an excellent way to enhance FTH's offerings. Building up a mailing list is a great way to build relationships with prospective members. I hope you're promoting the mailing list elsewhere. (I don't see it mentioned on your Facebook page, but then I was mostly evaluating your website and may have missed it...)

Your Meet Our Members page really stands out. A prospective visitor will want to know what kind of crowd they're getting involved with, and you show a large group, of varied ages, and their friendly profiles don't just tell about themselves; they promote Toastmasters and your club in a very inviting way. To a person nervous about visiting a crowd of strangers, this may very well be the selling point that nudges them to leave the safety of their homes and check you out.

Your home page has a little Facebook feed down in the lower corner. This is great, but I'd advise you to head it with a little invitation to visit you on Facebook. As it is, it's too easy for a visitor in a hurry to overlook this, and you have enough to offer that they might just stay around and get to know you better, if you show them what you've got.

Speaking of showing what you've got, your downloads area is a virtual treasure-trove, but many people will overlook it, not knowing all the good stuff they've missed. This may well be the nicest downloads area I've seen. I've seen others just as organized and I've seen larger, but you do both, do them exceptionally well, and everything I've downloaded has been high quality and very useful. (I will be downloading more, in time.)

There's a very complete visitor packet, there's a wonderful set of documents telling us all we want to know about meeting roles, and you even make heroic efforts to demystify Pathways! There's one thing you can do that's not too large, but would have vast benefits.

Understand that this huge amount of work you've done, besides being invisible to most visitors, is not as visible as you'd like to Google, because it's all in pdf form. If you add a few more pages that summarize these things, include all the really good keywords that will help your Google visibility, and then include either download links or an invitation to go to your downloads area for more, you'll all at once please google and dazzle your visitors with all your resources.

Your "Toastmaster for a Day" option is an important offering, that not too many clubs do. You have mentions to it on two of your sub pages, but not on your home page. While you may be trying to keep your home page from looking too cluttered, this is an option that you might want to put on your home page, to intrigue your visitors and keep them reading.

While I'm not officially here to evaluate your Facebook page, you've made efforts to dovetail it to your website, and that should be mentioned. I notice that among your posts, the share-worthy ones all contain links to your website. That, along with the Facebook feed on your home page lets each site point prominently to the other. Both Google searches and Facebook shares will then let prospective visitors notice you and from that find both your website and Facebook page. It's all tightly connected.

All in all, you get an A+ for your page. This is a really splendid job.