What is required for your Club?
WordPress, your Registrar’s offer, or Blogger for your Club? Forget about these three. I am not here to promote any particular offer and I will not point to any registration page here.
The objective is to demonstrate that there are other ways to proceed. Instead of thinking “how to” and “how much”, let’s think with a “where do I go” and “how do I proceed to do it quickly”.
AS EASY AS 1-2-3
First: you need a name
Since you are a club, it is a domain name ending in “.club” that you need. This domain name will soon be one of the possible choices during the registration phase in Google Apps for Work so don’t miss that part because:
- It is what defines your identity: you’re a club and you want to appear as a club online;
- the domain name is the first representation of the Trademark on Internet so if the name of your club Trademarked, remember the “.club” extension will add credibility to it.Regarding Trademarks, it is highly recommended to register in the Trademark Clearinghouse to keep an eye on future possible infringements;
- it is one the first things that your readers will see when they find your website in a search engine;
- it will appear and catch the eye on your business cards;
- as a club – again – it is much cooler to use a domain name ending in “.club”, instead of “.com”.
Second: you need a CMS
CMS stands for “content management system”. It is your publication platform yet to come: you will write your content on its back-end and it will be published on its front-end.
What we can see on the front-end is what appears when someone enters your domain name ending in “.club”. Google Sites is a good choice: it comes with Google Apps for Work and it allows to set up your email ending in “.club” too. Soon, you may even find it in Google Domains directly.
Third: you need a template for a club
This is where it gets interesting: many solutions exist to create a website online, but the one with Google Sites allows you to select templates during the creation process of your first website.
I like to remind you that many offers allow that too, but Google Sites has an option entitled “Browse the Gallery for more” and guess what: on the seven libraries of templates offered, one is entitled “Clubs and organizations“. Some are ugly but… many are quite nice and I have no doubt that you can build your first club online with one of these.
What is it that you can’t read here?
The minus about this offer is that Google neither promotes it nor promotes any other interesting options such as the one for Search Engine Optimization.
Clubs deserve the chance to know that it is possible to create club online in such a fast and efficient way. Regarding SEO, I have been using Google Sites for years and my website is now well indexed.
My preference goes to the template for the Soccer club, everything is there: design of the website, calendar, etc… Have a look at it.