Having a chapter website today is easy. And the best part is that it probably won’t cost your club a cent. I will explain that shortly, but your first question is probably not how, or how much, but why. Why should your chapter have website?

Actually, there are several reasons. First, it is a tool to find new members, or more to the point, to help them find you. My chapter, the Loveland Colorado Chapter, has gained members and inquiries from the website I created. In fact, as a result of having our website, we gained a member who lives several thousand miles away in New Jersey. The gentleman, who is very active in several New Jersey clubs, plans to retire in Colorado in a couple years. Because old cars are an important part of his lifestyle, he wanted to select a retirement location that provided plenty of old car activities. He became aware of our club through our website, which he found with an Internet search. He e-mailed me about a forthcoming visit, we met, and he and his wife subsequently joined our chapter. Until they can actually move here they visit regularly, and they plan their trips, at least partially, around our tour schedule.

In addition to its value in seeking new members, a website is another tool for communicating with your existing membership. Like a newsletter, it can have much basic information that members might need. It can contain contact information, membership rosters, meeting places and schedules, and tour schedules. It can also contain photographs of members and their cars, as well as tour and event photos. Unlike a newsletter, which has a short life and often disappears soon after it has been read once, the information on the website is always available when needed.

Okay, so a website would be nice to have. How do we get one and particularly at no cost? As I said, it is easy. I am writing this as living proof that it is not hard because I know nothing about programming. I created ours by just following the instructions in easy to use software. Check out the Loveland Chapter site at http://home.comcast.net/~dennislholland/index.html.

The Internet address above (URL) does demonstrate the one downside of the free website approach: you do end up with an awkward and difficult to remember site address. This isn’t really a big problem though. Anyone who uses it only has to type it once and then add it to his or her favorites or bookmarks. (See webmaster note below)*

Internet service providers are the gateway to the Internet. There are several types of access. Dial up access through your telephone line is by far the most common, but access in conjunction with your cable service or with a satellite dish are also available. For our purposes, it doesn’t matter which method is used because almost all contracts with an Internet Service Provider (ISP) today give the user the right to set up a personal website and to store the required files on the IPS’s server. They usually limit the space provided to 10 megabytes but that is more space than you will likely ever need. Few people take advantage of this option because few need or want a personal website. So all that you need to begin is for someone in the club, who has Internet access but did not create a personal website, to donate that space to the club.

Now you need someone to create the site. In most any club these days, there are usually many computer users, and at least one or two who are pretty knowledgeable. You know the ones – the ones everyone calls when they need help with their own computer. They are your best bet to create a website.

Next you will need software. In my case, I use Microsoft Publisher. I use it because I already own it. It comes as a part of Microsoft Office Professional. It is not a part of Office Standard nor of Office, Small Business Edition. Publisher is also available separately. But there are many other options. Web pages can be created in Microsoft Word, in Microsoft Front Page or in dozens of other programs available wherever you buy software.

I mention Microsoft products only because they are so widely used. But many other software companies make excellent products for this purpose. Virtually any desktop publishing program is suitable such as ones from Adobe, Quark, Corel, Serif and others. The chances are good you own something already to do the job.

As I am familiar with Publisher, I’ll give you some detail about using it but a very similar process is involved with any other program. Basically, you just follow the “wizards”.

Open the program, select File and then New from the drop-down menu. You will be presented with a long list of potential projects such as newsletters, brochures, calendars, business cards and, of course, websites. Select websites. Now you will be given a choice of many basic designs. The designs will provide a consistent theme, color scheme and a set of fonts for your site. I chose one named Accent Box. You can also choose a different colors and fonts from the ones normally a part of your chosen design or even create a design from scratch. But unless you have graphic design experience, it may be best to go with the layouts, colors and fonts the program recommends. You can then choose a layout based upon one, two or three columns.

Once the design is selected, a page will appear using that design. It will have sample text and pictures in a basic layout and all you need do is select a piece of their text and replace it with your own. Similarly, you can highlight their picture and paste in your own. You can then add sounds and background textures. You continue this process until the page is as you want it and then you have the option of adding another page. You continue to add pages until you have as many as needed.

This is probably a good place to mention that it makes sense to have a plan before beginning. Decide what you want the site to say, how many pages you will need, and what pictures to use. For example, the first page, known as your home page, will likely be a welcome page that explains who you are and what you do. Your last page will usually be a links page that connects to other websites that would be of interest to visitors to your site. What content you want between your home page and your links page is up to you. Be sure to use Veteran Motor Car Club of America prominently and use the VMCCA logo.

I should also mention that there are tradeoffs to be made. A site that uses a lot of pictures may look pretty but it will load slowly in the browsers of dial-up users. If you want a fast loading, efficient site, minimize the number and size of the photographs. If your members are prepared to wait a few moments for pages to load, or if many use a broadband connection like cable, satellite, or DSL, then a graphics-heavy site is great.

Now there is another step needed. You want your website to be easily found. That means that when someone is searching for old car club related material you want them to see your site. On the Internet that means accommodating search engines such as Google, Lycos, or Alta Vista. The way they work is that they have “bots”, a kind of automated browser, constantly combing the Internet and cataloging what they find. More specifically, they catalog the words they find. In order to accommodate that, most programs let you add words that are not visible but will be cataloged by the search engines.

So, click on File and then select Web Properties from the drop down menu. Now you will see a dialog box with two tabs, one for Site and one for Page. Select Site. Enter words like antique, classic, VMCCA, Glidden, tour, and touring into the keywords box and Veteran Motor Car Club of America, Classic car, old car, etc. into the description box. Use any words that you think a potential visitor might type into a search engine when looking for the kind of material you offer. Now, hopefully, when someone searches using those terms, your site will be among the sites found.

When you have your website finished again select File, and then Save as Web Page from the menu. It will prompt you for a place on your hard drive to save the files and will select Publish under My Documents as a default. Save your website. When it saves as a web page it will greatly compress the files to make them small and manageable for uploading and to fit in the space provided. For example, when I save my layout as I am making changes, the size of the file is over 120 megabytes. But when I save it as a Web Page it compresses to 2.5 megabytes, well within the 10 megabytes allowed.

You have created your website. The next step is to upload it to your ISP’s server. Most ISP’s provide tools to do that for you. My ISP is ATTBI (AT& T Broadband Internet), which is a cable Internet provider. So you go to the home page of your ISP and follow links until you reach a sign-in page for their upload tool. Give them your log on name and password. Now you browse to the location on your hard drive where you saved your site – c:\My Documents\Publish, select a file and click upload. Repeat until all your files are uploaded. Now use your browser, probably Internet Explorer, to visit and admire your new site. Congratulations. You are officially a Webmaster.

We have already made some efforts to make it easy to find your site. There is just one more step in that process. We want to send an e-mail to the VMCCA National Website Webmaster, Bill Johnson, and ask that he list your website on his links page. He will be happy to do so assuming that you have used the VMCCA name and logo correctly and that your site is old car related and does not contain or link to any inappropriate material. In turn, your links page should link to the national site and you should consider linking to other chapter websites. If you drop an e-mail to the other chapter webmasters, mentioning your intent to link to them, they will likely reciprocate. The more links the better as it makes it easier for people to find your website

As previously mentioned, these instructions are what worked for me. There will be some procedural variations with different programs and different ISP’s but most will work very similarly. Just follow the instructions and take it step by step. For advanced users, there are more efficient upload tools such as FTP. If you are sufficiently advanced to be aware of these tools, you probably know better than I how to use them.

There are roughly seventy chapters in VMCCA. There are only four chapter links on the national site. There might be a couple more sites that have not asked the national site to link to them. We should have a lot more. It is easy and it is free. Why not start the ball rolling for your chapter at your next meeting?

* Webmaster Note: Once your VMCCA Region, Chapter or Tour website is up, you can notify the vmcca webmaster and a link to your site will be place on the VMCCA.org web site. In addition, domain registration services that support “web forwarding” can be used as well. For instance, you can register a domain such as “mycarclubchapter.com” and then have this domain registration point to a personal web space. The benefit of this is that if the member changes Internet Service Providers or no longer wishes to host the site, the web site can be moved to another location and the “mycarclubchapter.com” domain can be changed to point to the new server location.