What a Club Website Owes Its Members

A club website owes its members the truth in three columns: what is happening and when, what the club has decided and where the documents live, and how to reach a person who can answer. Everything else is decoration. Most club sites are weak on all three for the same reason: the site was bought as a brochure and never given the job of being the club's public memory. The commissioning itself is its own small craft, and Mrežni plan lays it out in order: the brief, the checklist before publication, and the ownership questions a small organization should ask before it signs anything.

What should a member be able to find in ninety seconds?

The next event, the last minutes and a contact that works. The next event means the date, the place and the entry details current to this season, not a page from two years ago that still says details to come. The last minutes mean the club's own record of itself, posted where the members can read it. A working contact means an address or a form that reaches a person, tested often enough to know it still works.

A site that does those three things is doing its job. A site that does them plus photographs, a history and a member roster is doing its job well. A site that has the photographs but not the minutes has the priorities backwards, and the members can tell.

What does a club site not owe?

A magazine's polish, a shop or a feed. The club site that tries to be a publication dies of the effort, because the volunteer who was going to write for it has a job and a dog. The honest site is boring in the right way: the dates are current, the minutes are posted, the contact works. Anything beyond those three is a bonus the members will enjoy, and anything instead of them is a liability they will notice.

How does a club get a site that does its job?

By writing the brief before choosing the builder. The brief is the list of what the site must do, which for a club is short and specific: the calendar, the documents, the contact, and the ability for a volunteer to update all three without a developer. The builder is chosen against that list rather than against a portfolio, because a handsome site that a volunteer cannot update is a failure with good typography. The same ground, for an American small business, is covered by the SBA's launch guide.

Where does the website sit in the club's larger record?

Beside the minute book and the filings, not instead of them. The website is the public face of the same record that the club paper trail describes: the filings are the state's version, the minutes are the club's own, and the site is the part the members actually see. A club that treats the site as the memory, rather than as the publication of it, loses the memory the day the volunteer who ran it leaves.

The archive behind the site, the minute books and the result sheets the site publishes extracts from, is its own shelf and its own job, covered in where a club's memory lives. The website's debt is to be current; the archive's debt is to exist.