Creating a Club Website

We highly recommend using a service called SquareSpace for hosting your website. It's a very easy to use system so nearly anyone can easily update website content, yet at the same time it's very powerful and flexible so the technically minded will be impressed by how much it can do. It's reasonably priced at $14 per month.

The instructions below will take about 45 minutes to complete. There are a lot of steps and it's detailed, but as long as you are comfortable with a computer you can complete this without any special technical knowledge. After 45 minutes you'll be able to update your website anytime you like without any help from a programmer, or you'll be ready to delegate this to another member of your club to take charge of. 

1. Visit www.squarespace.com and click Sign Up
2. After completing registration you'll see a generic version of the website
3. Click the paintbrush in the top-right
4. You'll see 4 variations of the "Empire" template. For the purposes of this tutorial, stick with "Empire", but pick your favorite of the 4 variations.
5. After you click one, be sure to click the button "Enable Style" which is floating above
6. Click the link "Banner & Navigation". It may ask you to create a copy of the style
   - In the section "column layout" select the 3rd option
   - In the section "horizontal navigation" select the 1st option
   - Click "Save Changes"
7. Click "Fonts, Colors, & Sizes". This section is a little confusing at first, try this example:
   - Click your website's title (I mean the actual title where it says "Your Site Name" in large letters near the top of the page)
   - Notice in the drop-down menu at the bottom of the screen it now says "Site Title (H1)". This is telling you the element you just selected.
   - Click the "font color" box and try changing the color, you'll see it update real-time
   - Click the "Set" button to set the color
   - Click the "Save Changes" button to actually save this change to the title
   - You can change almost any element on the page using this process. 
8. If you followed the instructions above, right now you're website should look roughly like this:
    
9. In the top-right, click the 3rd icon (a cube with four cubes inside). Now you're in "structure editing mode"
10. Mouse-over the word "Links" under the Navigation menu, click "remove" when the link appears
    - Repeat for "Login"
    - Repeat for "Navigation" (this removes the whole section)
    - Repeat for the "Powered by SquareSpace" graphic 
11. Now mouse-over the link "About Me" but move the cursor just to the right of the words until you see the cross-hair, click and you can drag "About Me" upwards to make it the first link (right above "Journal")
12. Click "configure" link to the right of the "About Me" and in the pop-up:
    - Type "Home" into the Page Title, Navigation Bar Title, and URL Identifier.
    - Click "Save Page Configuration"
    - Note: you may see an error on the screen that says "Page Not Found", that's okay, ignore this 
13. Now, again, click the "configure" link to the right of "Home". This time click the button "Set as Front Page" at the very bottom.
14. Click "configure" link to the right of "Journal" and in the pop-up:
    - Type "Updates" into the Page Title, Navigation Bar Title, and URL Identifier.
    - Click "Save Page Configuration"
15. Click "edit" to the left of the word "Top", in the pop-up:
    - In the "Title" section where it says "Top", delete that word.
    - Click "Save" at the bottom
16. Now your website should look about like this:
    
17. Now click the 'A' icon in the top-right, now you're in Content Editing mode.
18. At this point you are previewing your website almost exactly how it will look to public visitors. Try clicking the link "Home" and "Updates" and you'll see what those two sections will look like when visitors click them. You have just created a two page website, the Home page is a generic HTML page where you can write an introduction about your club. The Updates page is a blog where you can easily post chronological updates announcing events or posting other news.
19. To update your "Home" page, click the link "Home" and then click "edit page" floating near the middle of the page.
20. To update your website title and footer, switch back to "structure editing mode" by clicking the 4 cubes icon.

That covers the basic SquareSpace tutorial. A few other important notes about the service:

• After you log out of your SquareSpace site then you're viewing it just like any public visitor will be. To get back into SquareSpace, just press ESC key on your keyboard while you're looking at your site.
• SquareSpace customer support is fantastic. If you ever have a question about how to do something and you can't easily figure it out, just click "Website Management" in the top-left and then "Support Tickets" on the right-hand side
• You will probably want to register a custom domain name, such as, www.chicagoobjectivists.org for your website. We recommend you purchase this on www.godaddy.com. The purchase process is straightforward, in case you've never purchased a domain before. After you do purchase it, to assign it to SquareSpace click "Website Management" and then "Custom Domain." You'll see a link to their User Manual, they have a great tutorial for linking your SquareSpace to your GoDaddy domain.
• If you followed the previous tutorial to create an email list, you probably want to allow your users to subscribe to this email list from your website. Here is a video tutorial showing how to do this.