After a few weeks of hunting down old website owners, domains and logos, wrangling with hosting providers, prising open the club wallet and stumbling up the learning curve, the new club website has been officially launched.
Address deesidedefenders.org
As described in our comms policy, the intent is to make the website the centre of:
Official communications with members
Promoting the club externally
Liaising with other local clubs and stores.
The new set up allows us to make use of many features which we promised:
A live calendar of club events, other local clubs, stores and show events.
A news feed for updates on club activities.
Game specific pages for promoting and managing games. (e.g. The Bloodbowl league.)
Photo Galleries
A membership area for promoting yourself and your own games
Polls and surveys
Official file organisation and storage for all members
Membership
You will need to sign-up to the website to get access to everything as some features of the site are restricted to members only.
The website conforms to the club policies on privacy. We only hold information necessary to run the club and communicate with you, and we will never make that information available to third parties.
You are strongly encouraged to sign up as members of deesidedefenders.org
Membership applications will be approved by the committee as we shall use this opportunity to clean our membership list, so please allow up to 24 hours for approval.
If you signed up for the website in 2021 then your membership remains valid. You should not need to do anything else. Any problems, contact the club secretary.
Social Media
We shall continue to maintain our Facebook, WhatsApp and Discord channels. Most members already use these for member-to-member chat, and they are far better suited for this purpose than a website. Our Twitter feed shall be discontinued, having only attracted 5 followers.
However none of these channels offers the ability to promote the club externally with the features the website will, so the website shall be the hub of our promotional efforts and official communication.
The Future
Stage 1: A lot of work has been done predominantly by the committee to get to this point, and things will continue to develop as new functionality is added. So check back often.
Stage 2: The website is only valuable to the club if it is current and provides information and features YOU. In stage 2 we shall begin to open up the website to delegate to members the ability to add events and write news articles. In addition we are looking for volunteers to take ownership of various sections, especially game specific material. This will be as successful as WE make it.
For an example check out the Blood Bowl League.
If you can handle word, then you can contribute to the site and the club. Absolutely no coding or website understanding required. Contact the club secretary to help.
Stage 3: Additional functionality that is being considered includes
a club store for branded merchandise, Tee shirts, dice etc.
hosting local traders and members with gaming related products to sell online
League tables, tournament results and campaign information for longer running games.
We are open to ideas, please use the Feedback Form on the website to make suggestions.
Polls and Surveys
We are running a survey to discover your views on the future of Gauntlet. To take part sign-up as a member and head over to the Polls page of the website.
“Speak now or forever hold thy peace.”
The poll will be open until the 9th of August, and the results available for games night on the 11th August. The results will form the basis for our approach to future all-day gaming events.
Thank you
A big club thank you to the following for helping make this happen.
William Smuts for updating our logos.
Tony Griffiths for input on bloodbowl league.
Tony and John Woolley for their persistence.
Aidan, Dave, Will and others for their help in reviewing and checking.
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