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Some suggestions for helping publicise croquet and your club online.

Facebook is often seen as the devil incarnate, particularly by seniors. However Facebook is a really handy system for free online publicity, displaying pictures of your club and its events and viewers don't even have to be Facebook members if they don't want. A Facebook account lets you create Pages and Groups.

Facebook Pages:

  • Are just like a free website or blog.

  • Entries on a Page are called 'Posts'. Posts can be just text, and/or pictures and links to other sites.

  • Are able to be created so the public are free to view them, or closed so that only people with a Facebook account can view them

  • Require a Facebook account to create and maintain them. there

  • Can have a quite sensible looking free 'domain name', the official term for a website address. For eg Hunter Croquets page is www.facebook.com/HunterCroquet

Websites are another great way to publicise your club. They can be just static information, or as complex and informative as you want. A website has 3 'components',

  • the actual website content and layout itself. You can easily create a free website using systems like Wix or Google Sites, plus many others. Wix gives a lot of flexibility in designing your site, Google is rather simplistic and limiting in its layout and features, but beggars can't be choosers.

  • the 'hosting' of a website requires an internet connected 'web server' computer somewhere in the world. Google Sites and Wix both provide a limited amount of space for free on their servers, usually quite adequate for say a club. Wix also puts some small adverts on your site as the cost of 'free'

  • and a 'domain name', ie the web address of your website such as www.croquet-nsw.org. Both Wix and Google sites provide a domain name for free for your site but they can look rather ugly, eg https://thehubtoronto.wixsite.com/thehub or https://sites.google.com/site/torontocroquetclub If you want a 'proper' looking website address then you have to pay a yearly fee for it. This is a Google Site where that club pays roughly a $20/year fee for the domain name www.wscclub.net You can also use a free redirection site like www.tinyurl.com to make a web address shorter and arguably a bit more meaningful eg http://tinyurl.com/torontocc

A free website:

  • needs a club member(s) to create and maintain it

  • Quite flexible in layout and menus of pages

  • Can add (embed) many things such as calendars, google documents, slide shows

  • Doesn't allow comments or interactions