TOPIC:

Hello! I've worked on my club's website since taking on an officer position in July 2020. My vision for the site has been to provide an experience that is easy to navigate and without information that website visitors (non-members) either don't know about or likely would not care about. My vision is to give visitors a clear, concise idea of who we are as a club while giving them the essentials on how to contact us.

I sincerely appreciate any feedback! coralgablestoastmasters.com/

The goal of an FTH site is to give visitors, especially those who are not familiar with Toastmasters, the information needed to intrigue them enough to visit our club meetings. I think your site accomplishes your stated goals. Looking at it from the standpoint of how I might consider FTH site adjustments the following ideas come to mind.

Home page

The video introduction/invitation by your president is cool! Your club home page is simple and inviting. Visitors should be able to quickly get an idea of what your site/club is offering and your home page accomplishes that.

Something to consider in your opening paragraph; the second sentence provides the link to launch your Zoom meeting. The last sentence in the paragraph invites the visitor to fill out the RSVP to attend the meeting. If the intent is for visitors to fill out the RSVP before attending, maybe the Zoom link belongs in or after the RSVP sentence at the end. (or some other method of sharing the Zoom address with a guest.)

Overall your home page appears to be optimized for mobile. The Flickr album works great. The video isn’t resizing to fit. Maybe the width setting in the iFrame can be set to % to fix that? (I haven’t tried this yet with iFrame on my site. I’ve only just begun to learn how to optimize our FTH site for mobile.)

You probably want to disable the recommended videos that appear once your YouTube video is done playing. Aesthetically it makes your homepage look cluttered with non Toastmasters content. That is gone with the next page refresh but we don’t want visitors to get distracted by Youtube and leave our FTH site.

My club doesn’t (yet) have YouTube content for me to work with this. Initially I thought it might be a YouTube account setting for the video but perhaps it is a little more involved. I found this for an initial look into the topic:

Meeting Info/Directions;

A picture of the entrance or parking area would help visitors get familiar with where to go once their app tells them they’ve arrived. Of course I don’t know about the hospital that contains your meeting space but sprawling places like University Hospitals in Cleveland can be daunting for a first time visitor to navigate.

You might also consider making your own annotated campus map in lieu of the map offered by the hospital. The campus map doesn’t show enough detail to follow the written directions from the entrance to the auditorium.

Contact Us

Rather than have two different systems for visitors to contact your club the site presentation would be a bit cleaner if you disable the FTH ‘Contact Us’ form. You could always add a menu link to your custom RSVP form if you prefer to have it listed in the Main Menu.

Information for Guests

I like the message at the top of this page. It provides a good description for visitors to begin getting familiar with your club.

My initial reaction is to think this page has some redundancy with the meeting information page. Such that a visitor should be able to learn everything they need to know about visiting your meeting from one page, not two?

Become a Member

Listing the pro-rated joining fees in a table is helpful because the application doesn’t include the club fees in this area. The table contains different amounts than the pre-loaded Paypal amounts and the information on the page doesn’t offer an alternative payment method to avoid the fee. (although it is on the application form). This page currently tells people they have to pay a little more than the dues so it might be a little cleaner to find a way to make them match.

Club Newsletters

Opening PDF’s inline in a new tab is great!

A few months back our district PR told me that Toastmasters retired the sunburst and asked me to remove it from our site. I poked around the TI site and other than taking note that the sunburst and some other design features are now absent from the brand portal, I didn’t see any notice of a branding change. I still don’t have a handle on how such changes get communicated but maybe it’s a matter of keeping an eye on the Brand Portal and Brand Manual.

Regardless of what you decide with the sunburst your image is squished. When resizing images you have to ensure the little ‘padlock’ icon next to the width is in the locked position to avoid breaking the aspect ratio and squishing the picture.

Take a look at your newsletter page on mobile to see the effect further exaggerated.

This thread contains a lot of great info about image sizing (especially pixels vs %) and ensuring everything looks correct on various screen sizes:

support.toastmastersclubs.org/2011-10-23...sive-mobile-friendly

Club Awards

Your club awards opens a PDF on the current tab. You might consider adjusting the link to make it behave like the newsletters. Or, perhaps better yet is making the club awards a custom page to avoid the need to edit and deal with linking a PDF. Once a visitor views your awards page, it’s desirable to avoid extraneous clicks for them to continue on to other parts of the site.

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I appreciate the opportunity to dig into the appearance and behavior of other FTH sites. I learn a lot about FTH and tuning a site for the Toastmasters experience. I occasionally sift through these review threads (as well as tips & tricks and other support threads) for ideas and have made many adjustments to my site in the process.

Hi Richard,

I'd like to first share my sincere appreciation for your in-depth and analytical review of my club's site. I'm grateful to have received feedback on the finer details to enhance the user experience. In regard to mobile friendly framing, I'm going to get some coaching from the FTH support admins. I played around with it on my own and it didn't work out.

In regard to the recommended videos, I saw the video you posted and it worked wonderfully. I used it for the welcome video and because the club channel only has that one video, no videos appeared at all at the end of the video.

Making an annotated map would be a great idea, and come to think, I could not even find where my club meets using the provided map. So, that will need work.

I consolidated the guest information and meeting info page into one page. For the Club Awards page, I used the same code to have my newsletters, for example, open in a new tab. However, it doesn't work though for club awards. I believe because it's on that main menu it will not allow for it to open in a new tab.

All the images are now mobile friendly and no longer distorted when looking from a mobile phone.

Once again, thank you for your feedback!

You're welcome, happy to help! Glad to hear you found some useful items in there.

Great job overall on your website. It seems to pop!

In my opinion, the home page is all about getting web visitors to be a guest at a meeting. If you have 2 or 3 guests on most meetings then you know its working. If not, you might benefit from a few tweaks:

On the home page, I recommend removing all unnecessary words. For instance, in your club name, I'd remove "The" and "Club." Then you have the name again in the banner. You could remove that. You're club number is taking up valuable real estate. If it's important to you for some reason to have that listed, then move it to the bottom.

You could create more interest by inserting a single row, 2 column table. Set the table properties so the border is 0. In one column install the photo of your zoom meeting and in the other install the YouTube. Having a combination of content that uses the whole width combined with content that uses half the width is very eye pleasing.

In the paragraphs you talk about Toastmasters International, which is fine, but if I'm considering your club I want to know about Coral Gables and how your club is unique among all other clubs.

After clicking on Club Awards, I was taken away from your website and had no way back. Perhaps open it in a separate window.

You've got a great Meet our Members page. IMHO this is the second most important page on the website.

Most clubs overlook the club calendar. It is the 3rd most important page as visitors want to know whats going on in the club. If it's mostly empty then it looks like a sleepy club. You could jazz it up by mentioning the meeting theme, if you use them, and a link to your Zoom meeting. You might include a few district events that are of interest to guests - Train the Trainer, etc. And congratulate members on the calendar when they earn awards. This also helps to promote your club as vibrant.

Great use of branding, colors, fonts and photos. Thank you for the opportunity to see you.

Nice job!  much better than ours (Davie).  I may hit u up for some tips. I just starting the website admin role.  

good luck with your club.

Steve