We try hard to make FreeToastHost as easy to use as possible to create a decent club/district website.
However, even with that, there are still some "care and feeding" / maintenance activities that most clubs will have to take care of periodically in order to get the most value out of their FreeToastHost website. Unfortunately, I regularly see clubs that think their website can be set up and forgotten about, and then later wonder why it is not meeting their expectations...
A Summary of "Care And Feeding" activities for your FreeToastHost Website:
- You need to pay attention to how current information and photos are on your website, particularly the home page. If you are including meeting summaries from two years ago on your home page, you may want to rethink that since it will not likely impress a potential meeting guest.
- You should certainly put member and club accolades/awards in a conspicuous place on your home page. However, remember to also remove those at the appropriate time in the future.
- Check your links to all external information regularly. You will be surprised how often web page addresses get changed resulting in broken links.
- Make sure you reconcile your members list after every dues period (twice a year) with the "official" TI downloadable club roster. Members will come and go, and since FreeToastHost cannot be linked to the TI member data, doing this twice a year reconcile is a good practice to ensure that your members list is accurate, so you are not sending unwanted emails to former members.
- Check your club calendar periodically for repeating events that no longer are happening in reality.
- Look for outdated information and photos on supporting web pages and hide or remove them.
- Periodically check that your Contact Us form works as intended. Remember, that people do sometimes change email addresses and phone numbers.
- Periodically check anything that is based on flash and/or videos to ensure they still work.
- Is your Administrator Information (name and email) still accurate or did your club/district change administrators and forget to update the system?
- Periodically check your Floater Messages to ensure they are still current.
- It is really important to reconcile meeting agendas after every meeting. What this means is to ensure that the members assigned to roles for the past meeting match who actually did the roles in reality by going in and editing the agenda for the recent past meeting to correct the role assignments. If you do not do this, the role history will be inaccurate.
If there are any recommended practices I have missed, please feel free to reply to this thread.
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