STARTING A WEB PAGE FOR YOUR SCOUT UNIT In tracking the search terms that led to visitors to our website, we saw that many of our visitors had an interest in developing their own scout unit website. We started our site a year and a half ago with no previous experience in website development. Since that time we have continued to add onto the website. Today it is one of the highest rated sites by the search engines. This page shares some of our experiences in hopes that we can assist other units in developing their own website. START WITH THE BASICS The basics for your website are a home page with introductory information about your unit and activities, an about us page that tells about your history, sponsor and perhaps troop leadership, a contact us page with e-mail or other contact information. You may want to post a calendar of events for your troop. A great deal more can be added as your website develops over time. DO IT YOURSELF OR CONTRACT? Perhaps you or a parent has the skills or interest needed to develop your website. While there is a learning curve, we found it to be very manageable if you are patient and willing to learn. There are numerous sources available in most communities that will develop your website. In our community, the cost starts around $100 for a basic website. IF YOU DO IT YOURSELF If you do the website yourself, consider using a template. This template is a series of interlinked pages that makes it very easy for you to develop your own site. From our experience we highly recommend Allwebco They provide excellent templates at a very low cost. There is a discount for not for profits. In our experience they have been wonderful people to work with. They are very responsive and provide great support. Their help pages are detailed and work you through the process step by step of creating a webpage. Editing your website is easy using the program notepad – a free program which is included with windows software or you can purchase an editing program such as coffeecup or contribute. If you are doing editing in notepad, a basic understanding of html will help greatly. There are many web resources that will give you a basic overview of html editing. SECURE A DOMAIN NAME The domain name is your address on the web. You will want to find a domain name that can be easily remembered and makes sense for your unit. Our domain name is bsatroop1.us. You have several choices for domain names. For example, troop1 troopone Indianatroop1 By changing the extension or suffix, you have even more options bsatroop1.com bsatroop1.org SEE IF THE DOMAIN NAME IS AVAILABLE There are a number of sources to see if a specific domain name is available. You can also check to see if your chosen domain name is available as a .com, .org or .us. We are using godaddy.com as our source to check availability. We have found that their domain acquisition rates are very reasonable. In some instances, a hosting company will provide the domain at no charge if you purchase hosting with them for a specific period of time. HOSTING You will want to secure a host. Your troop files reside on the server of your host company. Again, we have used godaddy and found them to be very reasonable and they have provided good support to us. A hosting company will typically provide a number of tools that can be used to add more advanced features to your website such as a blog. UPLOADING YOUR FILES Your hosting company will provide specific information for how you can load (called uploading) your completed template files onto their server using an FTP client which your host typically will provide. This usually is a fairly straight-forward process. There may be a slight delay up to a few hours after you activate your account for the first time before you can actually view your website live for the first time. LINK TO SEARCH ENGINES You want people to be able to find your brand new site. This is similar to having your telephone number published in a directory. To greatly improve and speed up this process, you will want to list your website with the major search engines such as google and yahoo. For google, this process is listed under google tools. You create an account and get access to a number of free resources. EXPANDING YOUR WEBSITE As time goes on, you will want to add other features to your website. One of the handiest free tools that we have found is Google calendar. You can add your unit events to the calendar along with information about the event. Another helpful free tool is Wordpress which can be used to create your own unit blog. A blog is a nice way to communicate with your readers in a friendly, conversational tone. ADDING PICTURES AND IMAGES The effective use of photographs and other images can bring a website to life. Your web template may contain easy to use gallery pages. There are other options also available on the web to make adding photographs easy. A good photo editing software such as Adobe photoshop elements makes the job much easier. You will need to convert your photographs to .jpg or a similiar format. In addition, you will want to reduce your photographs to a size that displays well on your photopage. In some instances you may need to create a full size version for a single page and a series of smaller thumbnail sized photos on a page that will display multiple images for the viewer to select. This is what we do on our website photo galleries. ODDS AND ENDS How many visitors - you have multiple tools available to track your visitors. These include tools that your host provides, Google tools and add-ons. We like statcounter. It is a great free service that provides all kinds of data on your visitors including their location, time on site and pages visited.