Making a successful club website can be a ridiculously daunting task. Worse, it can be easily be screwed up. Below is our teams tips on how to make a great site without either blowing a years worth of money that could have been spent fixing trail bridges, or gassing up your groomer. We used a snowmobile club for an example.
This advice should not be taken with a grain of salt. It is not geared towards having you join our network, although many basic heavy lifting tasks could be skipped, nor is it designed solely for those who are already on our network.
It is for you, the person who is trying to come up with ideas for a snowmobile club website.
We also will objectively offer what you should and shouldn’t be paying. Take our advice. We own thousands of domains, hundreds of sites, and know online in and out.
Form a Plan for your Club Website
Let’s first establish a To-Do list for your How-To Build a Snowmobile Club Website Plan:
- Register a Domain
- Consider How New, Potential Members Will Find You
- Pool your Members for Website Admin Helpers
- Integrate Social Network Functionality
- Make Sure Your Hard Work Doesn’t Go Unnoticed
- Keep Info Current
Getting a website Domain for your Snowmobile Club
Godaddy’s Superbowl Commercials May Suck, but I highly recommend them
Buying One without Paying for it
A custom domain name speaks volumes for your club. It also helps a whole hell of a lot when people are on the web searching for a club in North Shore MN (for example). However, make it too long, no one will remember to type it. If your club is named ‘Northen Minnesota Duluth Lake Superior Snowmobilers of America” – you don’t need to add a .com for that. Nor should you fret if you cant buy NMDLSSA.com (which you shouldn’t buy – because who will remember that?!).
Pick one that describes you and people can remember AND spell easily.
Example. DuluthSnowmobileClub.com
Don’t Be Afraid to Buy a Cheaper Domain
There are thousands of people sitting on their ass waiting for domains to be worth something. Your DuluthSnowmobileClub.com may be taken, yet not have a website that’s sending traffic to it. Buy the .org version instead. It doesn’t hurt your credibility, and really, if people search for Duluth Snowmobile Club in google (assuming you are using tools that help you with this, or did the legwork yourself), they will find you anyway.
Lastly, Do NOT spend more than $13 a year on domain hosting.
Godaddy, name.com, and others are all reputable hosts. I do not recommend 1and1, they will mess things up majorly for you, but they advertise cheap sites. GoDaddy is really a strong player in this space. They have a lot of custom tools available to you should you choose to use them later. However, do not fall for the continuous upsells. Your club domain does not need to be private, it doesn’t need to have Secure Certs, Chicken Feathers, or a Star Named After It In Space. I do have over 1,000 domains with them, and a referrer discount. I do not believe in filling my articles full of ads though, so visit my discounts page to get a link.
OPTION: Free!
You can always use a network like ours that offers SUBDOMAIN functionality for your clubs website, example: yoursite.ClubHosting.org . When you join something like this – or yoursite.Wordpress.com , yoursite.Tumblr.com , etc, your Subdomain is actually being treated as it’s own domain. Confusing? Kind of. But really, large networks like the ones above go through painstaking measures to ensure your site isn’t effecting the money they spend advertising theres, and we all talk to Bing and Google to tell them that they shouldn’t treat everything the same (tech talk, sitemaps and robot files – more on that later)
Editors Note: Did you know that you can use your own custom domain and point it to yoursite.Clubhosting.org. This will help keep your search ranking the same, offer a custom name for your site, as well as allow you to retain full control of your traffic.
Decide How New and Potential Club Members Will Find Your Website
Many charlatans will say everyone will come from google. This is simply not true. Don’t design a website and rely solely on that, because really, it will only make up a piece of your traffic, and maybe not even the best.
Social Networks or Club Facebook Page
ok, facebook if we really must say it. While we encourage everyone to have their own site, and not to worry too much about posting information SOLELY on Facebook, you can’t overlook how easy it is to hit a Like button and have that action shared with 100 other of your friends. Since we all know snowmobiling is a social activity, it is important to make a page to help direct those users to your website. More on this later
Incoming Links from State/Prov Departments and Associations.
Almost every region has an association of snowmobilers that attracts both Clubs and Rider memberships. We all know they offer varying degrees of services, but the biggest one that would be advantageous of your site is having them link to your club. So once you get your domain name and fill it out, go make sure your clubs profile on their network is updated.
Search Engines for Clubs and Activities in your Area
Don’t worry about this too much. If you are on a large network like ClubHosting.org (or more importantly, on the http://www.ClubHosting.org/club-directory/ ) you are pretty much covered. Also – being on sites like your State or Province Snowmobile association is key, as they link to you. If you really want, you can create a sitemap, and submit direct. However, this isn’t all that important.
Local Events
Local events drum up good fundraising drives. You can spend hundreds on banners or print flyers to hang up at local bars though. Chances are if you do a drinking for dollars fundraiser, no one will remember what your site URL is next morning.
Sponsor Education
Having your club members actively participate in snowmobile safety training as well as publishing articles spread around in local newspapers reminding people to be respectful and stay ON TRAILS helps keep your name out there. Allow people to view these replications online, or better yet, sign up for classes. If you build it, they will come.
Links from Sponsoring Businesses
Club friendly restaurants, hotels, and more should all link to your local club. Best yet, if you can build a widget for them (or ahem, use someone else’s) they can even link content from your club. Such as trail condition alerts from you, Weather Widgets, Snow Depth Charts and more.
Word of Mouth
There is nothing like an excited user sharing your trail condition updates on a message board, email, facebook, etc. Those posts attract those riders that may also be coming from out of state and rely heavily on your up-to-date site. These riders will book rooms with sponsors, etc. This is very important. Make sure your links are friendly to allow people to hit pertinent information. We offer link sharing options for every post for trail updates. Email, Facebook, Twitter, Link to Direct, anything.
..You should too.
Recruit a Team for your Club Website Management
The biggest problem many Website tonight, or 1and1 style sites has is that you can have a large group of people all contributing to the same thing. With a facebook style page, you can assign multiple admins, but with the others, you may have to share the login info, which means there isn’t something secure only to be used by Club Presidents or Board Members.
This means one person is stuck volunteering time to update trails, post events, pictures, and more. Depending on the type of sytem you are using to create your website, this can be a LOT of time. You should consider finding some help.
Ideally, you can use a content management system (tech talk – an example is of course ClubHosting) that would allow you to assign member roles to people. Ideally, a website admin should only be 1-2-3 people tops. Then assign your volunteers Editor roles, which allows them to update trail conditions, post warnings, and more. On our network, as a working example, this lets them add news without you needing to worry about them going in and breaking your site.
But fair warning, don’t just hand it off to anyone. Sure, someone’s kid, friend, relative may supposedly design websites, but that poor version of info is what is representing you to new riders. Your trails may be groomed amazingly, however, if you have an awful presentation, you won’t really be helping yourself.
Making Your Snowmobile Club’s Website Social
Using facebook helps a bunch if you have a lot of riders on facebook. However, you should limit to what you do. For one, you most likely won’t have a high level designer handling your facebook account. So your page can be cluttered. Of course, there are several people who ride your trail and may not have a facebook account. What you should do is make it friendly to integrate with a social network. People should be able to use Facebook or Twitter (or maybe even Google+) accounts to post comments. However, you shouldn’t be powered solely by them, or force registrations through them.
Add a Like Box, and a Share Box to posts (or use someone who offers those things standard) which will allow users to share your trail conditions. Maybe make a page, but the page shouldn’t be where you update. It should be a syndication of your REAL site. Also consider adding other network buttons to it. Digg, Stumble Upon, etc. I will add more to this topic later.
New and Shiny Always Attracts People (and Fish)!
Get the word out there that you have a new website. First thing to do is tell your members. Easiest way to do this is email if you have tools to message new users (ours on ClubHosting is pretty basic – we just have a box where you can past addresses and a quick message telling people to checkout your new blog).
I personally recommend multiple steps.
a) Email your users
b) Send a newsletter to them via mail
c) Add it to trail maps
d) Look for feedback from snowmobile community websites and forums (like hardcoresledder, etc)
Keep Your Club Website Updated!
I cannot stress this enough. Nothing will save you from becoming just another waste of space on the web if you do not have your site current!
Many people struggle with this because the site they make is a giant pain in the ass to add new content. This is really why you should use a solid management system. If you could add content – even if it’s a quick – “Trails are closed for Season” update, and do it quickly, your site will stay up to date. If it takes minimal effort to update your site, you will keep it current. If it is current, snowmobilers will visit it more often. The more visitors you get, the more value you have to your local business sponsors and more!
Keep it current.
Hope this helps
Nick @ ClubHosting.org