Hola O-friends,
I have seen a fair bit of discussion on this forum about club websites. I'd like to share a solution that my club (Columbia River Orienteering Club) initiated about one year ago that's worked out very well - Squarespace.
Squarespace offers cleanly designed templates, wonderful customer support, competitive pricing, good event calendar functionality, and easy maintenance on the backend. In addition, square space gives you a 10 day free trial period for you to play around with their platform and see if it works for you.
Note that our club currently does not offer online event registration for our regular meets. It's my understanding that squarespace has some additional tools for online event registration, but I have not explored them.
If you want to dive more into it, we are using the “Bedford” template. Cost is $18 a month, prepaid annually. If you use the discount code “GIMME10” I think that gives a 10% discount off an annual plan.
Prior to this, we had a custom website built in Drupal. It looked pretty snazzy, but it cost I think around $2500 to get it off the ground, and the person who wrote it did not want to have any part in maintaining it afterwards. Finding someone locally who knew how to make needed changes turned out to be quite a headache. Squarespace might look a little more plain vanilla to some, but I can assure you that the simplicity in design and maintenance more than make up for it. (I made the website at zero cost to my club mostly over a long weekend.)
If anyone reading this is considering a makeover for their club website, I can highly recommend squarespace. If you're serious about this project, you can get in touch with me directly and ask more detailed questions about our site. I'm glad to help in anyway that I can. You can use the contact form on our website, those emails go to me.
Feel free to check out our site here:
croc.orgCheers,
John Godino
President and web gnome, CROC