frequently asked questions

Once we've received your template selection, data and payment, we will purchase the template and start work right away. Your site should be online within a week depending on which Plan you selected and how many pages you want. A full-blown site with all features may take a little longer. In this case, we may elect to bring the site online when it's partially completed so the Search Engines can start indexing. A key ingredient to this turnaround time is the receipt of all your data.

That depends on which Plan you select. The most successful sites have content...and plenty of it. Go to our Associations page and link to some of the Local associations that have Web sites. Be critical; what sites look good; what sites look bad? You'll find the bad ones have little information and in many cases it's totally out of date. Would you re-visit those sites? Probably not.

Your Home Page is the focal point and needs lots of narrative describing your organization, your goals, events that you participate in each year, what the membership requirements are, information along those lines. You want to get potential members and sponsors excited about your commitments. Here are some other items, you may think of others:

• The Plan and features you want
• The name of your organization
• A list of Officers (Contact Us page?) and their email addresses (for forwarding)
• Contact information for your Web person
• Mailing address
• Personal contact information for registering your Domain name
• The Home Page content (who we are, why, when, etc.)
• Meeting details content and dates (Meeting page?)
• A list of upcoming Events (Activities page?)
• Newsletters (we'll upload the last 3 issues if you send them to us in Word or PDF format)
• Announcements (on Home Page?)
• Continuing Education schedules
• A recognition page?
• A history of the association?
• For a private, Members-Only Area:
  • Current directory of members with addresses and email
  • Committee chair and co-chair lists
  • Employment section
  • Minutes of membership meetings
  • Treasurer's report

Don't forget, we only publish what you send, we do no editing (other than spell‑checking). You may want to enlist the expertise of one of your good writers to play the role of Editor so all the data you send us is in top form.

The best way is either in an email as text or in a MS Word document. Most of the data you send will be copied and pasted into an HTML Web page and formatted. Some of the data will be actual documents such as forms (sign up for an event) or newsletters and may be in PDF format. In this case, we will simply upload the form to the Web site and put a link on the appropriate page, e.g.:

Sign up for our Annual Golf Tournament, link here for the details and Registration Form!

Your newsletters are probably in Word format (or perhaps PDF), send them with a short, one-sentence synopsis highlighting the contents and we will publish the synopsis and a link to the Word or PDF document, something like:

March 2007 - plans for Race For The Cure, Regional Conference, food collection details for The Food Pantry, letter from the Regional President

Don't send documents in a non-common format such as MS Publisher. Convert these uncommon formats to a PDF file first. There are free PDF printer drivers on the Web if you need one, here's one we've used in the past.

You should plan on updating the Web site each month. Make the Web a scheduled item for both your Board and Membership meetings. It's especially important once a 'date has passed' for some event or activity, you notify us to remove it. For example, you may have a notice on your Home Page of an upcoming event in two months, let us know when the event is over so we may remove the notice. You'd be surprised how many sites maintain this type of information prominently even though the event is long over. Anyone visiting a site with information that stale would probably never plan on returning.

Each plan (except Starter) is alloted one hour each month for updates. Each month's alloted hour is based on a calendar month, the first through the last day. If you send us more than one item per month, the total time will accumulate for that month, each item has a minimum base time of 30 minutes. Therefore, you could send us two items in a calendar month and if the actual time did not exceed 1 hour, your two updates would incur no extra charge. Note that additional time exceeding the hour would incur a $25 per hour charge.

As a general policy, we do not send out bulk emails for our clients. There are a number of Web-based emailing services that may fill your needs.. It's important in any of your email campaigns that those you send to (excluding your own association members) have opted-in for your emails.

We have no experience with any of these service providers and are therefore unable to personally recommend any:

• Campaign Monitor (no monthly fee, $5 per campaign + .01 per email)
• Constant Contact (monthly fee)
• Jango Mail (monthly fee)
• Mail Chimp (no monthly fee, pre-pay credits)