Do not be a secret council. Publicize your events, recruit new members and demonstrate what you do to help your parish and community. Develop a council website to share your news and help with recruitment.
- Choose a domain name: kofc9999.org.
- Choose a hosting company to make your website visible on the internet.
- Choose a software program to design and update your website.
There are many hosting companies and software programs. GoDaddy has good hosting plans from $9.00 to $15.00 a month including one free domain name and they provide an easy setup for a WordPress site. One and One is another hosting company.
SOFTWARE: Microsoft Front Page and Expression are no longer supported. These have been replaced by Microsoft Visual Studio which can cost over $1,000. Dreamweaver can cost from $20 to $50 a month. Adobe Business Catalyst starts at $17.00 a month and is more difficult to use. Open source website programs have thousands of free templates for websites. WordPress, Joomla, Weebly, Drupal and others are great programs. I recommend wordpress since it is the easiest to use. https://wordpress.com/ Who uses wordpress? CNN, Harvard, Boston Univ.
WORDPRESS EXAMPLES: Northern California Chapter-http://norcal.kofc953.org
Orange Diocese Chapter: http://www.ockc.net/
Plugins: free scripts to improve your website– some easy ones below.
- Huge It Slider for photo slide show
- Fast Secure Contact Form – for contacting you – includes captcha code
- Tablepress allows use of tables and links
- Jetpack provides blog subscriptions, facebook and twitter links, and other great features.
WordPress themes: thousands of themes with different options and colors that you can customize for your website. Google is changing their website ranking system based on mobile friendly websites. The search giant is officially updating its algorithms to favor websites that look and perform better on mobile devices, making them appear higher on search results. You can make your wordpress mobile friendly with one click in your administrative page.
Link your wordpress site to your council facebook and twitter pages.
You can experiment with a wordpress site free at: https://wordpress.com/ Your site can be: yourname.wordpress.com. You can make changes and experiment and then decide what theme, colors, etc you want for your domain site.
Questions – Contact State Council Webmaster