Welcome to our long anticipated website update! The new club website was created to better accommodate the needs our of Club with:

• Better Marketing
• Better Educational Goal Setting
• Better Meeting Planning

Better Marketing

This website will answer the basic questions the world may have, such as:

• What is Plantation Toastmasters?
• …and, of course, “Why should you join Plantation Toastmasters?”
• …that would certainly involve showing the public, “Who Plantation Toastmasters members are.”
• …where finally, they’ll need to know When and Where Plantation Toastmasters holds its meetings.

Our previous site did a lot of these things well, however, it wasn’t the best tool for showing off this wonderful eco-system we have built here at Plantation Toastmasters. Basically, this new site looks better and inter-operates with social media exceedingly better.

Better Educational Goal Setting

Vice Presidents of Education take note, this will make your goal setting much more efficient!

Reporting was basically non-existent on the old site. The new site tracks members progress as they make their way through the educational and leadership programs.

To kick things off, you and/or the Vice President of Education enter your progress to this point, and then as you give speeches and fill roles, progress is tracked by the system in real time. When you fill a leadership role that isn’t an agenda item (ie, you chair contest), you check it off. Stay tuned for a video on this in the coming days and weeks.

Essentially, PlantationToastmasters. com becomes a functional dashboard for education goal setting and planning.

Better Meeting Planning

Here at Plantation Toastmasters we are proud of setting the bar higher than others. The attractive look of our agenda, kind of a marketing piece every member and guest sees and can take with at every meeting, sets us apart from other clubs.

With the old site, the agenda had to be manually created, or ran through a clunky script I threw together. It was tedious, and signing up for and administering club roles was near impossible on mobile devices.

On this site, nearly everything is a few clicks. An attractive, perfectly up-to-date agenda print out is a one click affair.

Roles can be signed up from your phone.

Reminders are automatically e-mailed to role fillers 3 days ahead of time and also 4 hours before the meeting—helping us keep our commitments when the rest of life puts Toastmasters to the back of our minds.

I present the new, PlantationToastmasters.com!

• Powered by the premiere website blogging software, WordPress.
• Tens of thousands of plug-ins are available to add functionality to the site as needed.
• Uses WordPress for Toastmasters, developed by District 47’s very own David Carr (Club Awesome), for agenda/educational goal planning, with some officially integrated tweaks introduced by yours truly.
• Anyone in the club can contribute content (articles, photos, videos, etc.).

“This is great! What can I do?”

The more consistent we post articles and photos, the more prestige our Club has when researched by potential new members. In addition, you know, communications is a big deal with Toastmasters—it involves other types of communication besides just speaking. This site is a learning opportunity for all of us!

Stay tuned for more updates! If you would like to contribute, simply sign in and click on + New and choose post at the top.

See you soon!
-Nick Smith, VP Public Relations

Welcome to the new site, intrepid Plantation Toastmasters club member.

Stay tuned for more news and exciting things to happen as I find time to work on this in the coming days and week.

-Nick

Toastmasters is all about doing to learn new skills. Giving speeches is the most obvious thing, however, opportunities to learn and develop other skills naturally pop up in the operation of a club infrastructure.

One of those opportunities is in the club’s web and social presence.

For the past ten years or so, Plantation Toastmasters has used a Toastmasters-centered website hosting service known as ToastmastersClubs.org (or “FreeToastHost”). While this service has served our needs well, it has some pain points.

Those pain points include:

• Poor mobile device support (both public and for internal club operations)
• Poor support for a modern look overall
• No SSL support
• No support for a decent looking club agenda (I literally had to create a script that parses the incoming email into a list and then merges the agenda into a decent looking template).
• We have little say in improving the service (as 10,000 clubs use I believe)
• No support for club announcements/Facebook integration.

Of course, it was free, which his hard to argue with.

I decided I would take this opportunity as incoming Vice President of Public Relations to assemble a site that would more accurately reflect the character and dynamism of this group.

To share the learning experience, below are the steps taken to get the site to a point where the WordPress software is installed and operating in a “Coming soon…” configuration. As much as I would have liked to have involved others in the process, this was a quick, one person process. I explain why below by detailing the steps that needed to happen:

Domain Name

In this case, AZ Zimmerman, a long time club member, has been maintaining the domain registration since 2009. So while registering a domain name with a registrar (in this case GoDaddy), is a quick process, it’s was even quicker as he had already registered it.

Setup Webhosting

This is one of those ways we really benefit from having a computer ner…ahem, expert. I host a few other websites with a service known as, and I am not kidding, “No Support Linux Hosting”. For $1 a month, we have hosting space for a low volume website (as a Toastmasters club website will generally be). Specifically, we will have 1GB of storage and 30GB of bandwidth each month. No, we can’t call them with questions on how to use WordPress (that’s where I step in as I adminster several professionally), but they are generally responsive if there is a technical issue (ie, the site hosting is non-responsive). Should the day arrive when I leave Plantation Toastmasters, unless there is someone else in the club with similar technical experience, we should probably consider moving the site to a more traditional webhost (that may increase the price some, but will offer more robust support if needed).

I’ll add here that WordPress is popular, and as long as it is kept updated and members have secure passwords, we should be in good shape.

I plan to keep a copy of the login credentials to the webhosting space, along with other proprietary info for access purposes, with another trusted member of the club always. This is what we lovingly refer to as the Bus factor in Information Technology.

Configure the Domain Name DNS Settings

DNS is the fancy name for the Internet’s phone book. Basically, it is points a web browser looking for https://PlantationToastmasters.com to 216.51.232.64. This is done in a control panel with the web registrar (though that is not always necessary, and not necessarily the case depending on the registrar and the services they offer, but with GoDaddy, it was the case).

Here I am setting up the site’s “A” record (no sound):

 

Setting up Secure Webhosting

I was pleasantly surprised to find out the our $1 a month webhosting includes a well supported SSL/TLS certificate. Thus, while I was expecting to spend $9 to secure the site—it turns out it was already secured, which is awesome.

Install WordPress

Fortunately, most web hosting services have a “Fantastico” control panel. Basically, it automates the installation of WordPress. I provided an administrator name and password that would let me use WordPress, and it did its thing.

The Ah-Counter is prohibited from clicking me during this poorly thrown together video below showing the WordPress installation. Honestly, if you want to learn how to install WordPress, there are much better videos out there (and be sure to check with your webhosting provider for specifics for their service). This does have sound…I just don’t start talking until about 7 seconds in:

After WordPress was installed, I:

• Installed David Carr’s Lectern theme, which is approved by Toastmasters International branding
• Installed the WordPress for Toastmasters plugin (and its dependency, RSVP Maker).
• Configured the site to discourage web crawlers (the automated programs Google and Bing use to index websites). We’ll re-enable this after we have the site more configured and some content posted.
• Setup a page that welcomes visitors and directs them to the legacy club site at ToastmastersClubs.org and made it the front page for now.