FIRST DETERMINE THE PURPOSE!!!

I believe that the capacity that we have is fairly limited so it is necessary right from the get go to decided how that space can be used to the best benefit of the club. If it turns out like the chitchat on the Yahoo site it will fail to serve any good. Have you ever tried to go back and find something you thought you saw or even worse something you needed on the Yahoo site?

The web site as I see it should have two primary goals.

1. It should be a convenient place for members to go to see lists of competitions, planned field trips and other club activities, maybe what other members are into.

2. It VERY MUCH should be a marketing device to attract new members. Here is where chaos will be absolutely detrimental.

People that are looking to join a camera club should get the idea that the club and the members will be a worthwhile use of their time, that it will be beneficial to their own photography. I know it is fun to talk about the dinner clubs with a photography habit, but on the web site that is not what new people will be looking for. They Googled camera club not dinner club.

There should be a good write up on the Portfolio Challenge because that is the strong point of the club. An article that really sells the Portfolio Challenge as something that anyone can benefit from.

second make a Firm Decision on and organize Content before you add anything!!!

Just like writing a data base, before you start, you have got to know exactly where  you are going and everything you expect to see when you get there, if you want to be successful.

The Home Page has to be easy to read, well organized, easy to navigate, interesting and welcoming to members and to visitors. I looked at a number of camera club sites and truthfully the Houston Camera Club is the best site I found.

Houston Camera Club

http://houstoncamer aclub.org/ default.aspx

Well organized tabs that are easily readable with very business like areas. Front page lacks a little in design and a little sloppy on the bottom but inside pages are clean and readable. The main thing is to make the site easy to navigate or no one will use it and this site is easy to navigate. This site makes excellent use of a small amount of site space because it is organized. Much of the contents are off site links to members sites, to the newsletter, to photographic related sites. This web site is very well done.

One nice feature is the Contact Us page.

Houston Photochrome Club

http://www.houstonp hotochromeclub. org/

Front page is a little better balanced design than the Houston Camera Club but a little garish and the tabs are difficult to read. Not very sophisticated in appearance. Inside is fairly clean but a little amateurish in use of color.

Of course, we could put up a list of restaurants and their menus with a side note mentioning that most of the members know what a camera is.

Posting photographs is a big problem. HCC only posts the first place photograph of the end of the year competition, about ten to fourteen total, and they are posted in a table. Everything else is handled by links to the member's gallery sites. Web sites are administrated and not really the place for everyone to have free access to posting and commenting on photographs.

Everyone that is into photography should have a gallery site. I am partial to Flickr but there are many others. Pbase and Smugmug are a little more sophisticated in design layout but still easy to use.. Some have nominal fees, many are free. Some sites even offer the advantage of giving critiques when requested. A number of the club members use Picasa, which is free. If photos are posted to the site there needs to be some discussion of a maximum file size and a discussion of optimizing for web display.

Anyone concerned about their ability to set up a gallery site please ask my help. If I don't know how I will find out how. Flickr has a Uploader that is drag and drop and you can use Flickr free with a limited amount of space and sets limited to three, I believe.

If we are going to do a president's page, a competition page, that sort of thing as blogs we need to be sure that the officer's in charge of those areas are as committed to posting to the site as they are currently to the newsletter, or would Terry say, more committed? Then these could be removed from the newsletter to make more room for articles.

As far as Graden's bios, that would be much much easier done on a separate blog with a link on the website. I would be glad to work with Graden to set up a private blogspot, which is free, and we could link to each of the members individually on the web site. Would be a lot easier to post the photographs and to keep updated than it will be on the web site.

Actually we could set up a blogspot, free, to post the monthly competitions winners and link to it from the web site. That would give an unlimited ability to critique, ask question, make comments on each of the photographs.

BTW: make the web site text readable. On the black text on dark gray background I had to copy and paste into MSWord before I could read it. Okay, I'm old, hard of hearing, can't eat with my dentures in and am going blind. Take pity one the one thing I have left, my limited vision.

All it will take is a few months of inattention and the site will be like fifty of sixty camera club sites I looked at on a list of links I found—only ten of the sites were still active.

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