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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