Getting the Most from Your Council Website

Council website functions:

• Public Education: The primary purpose of your website should be to help the Council further the Navy League and individual Council missions. In other words, it should supplement educating the public about the sea services. To do this is must be oriented to the public and be closely tied to the programs of the Navy League.
• Support of NLUS Programs: The "look and feel" of the site emulates the NLUS Headquarters site. In addition, we have included a section entitled "Our Sea Services" which is intended as a section devoted to information about national and local programs promoting the NLUS mission.
• Effective/efficient Council Operations: Council operations require the dedicated efforts of many volunteers and a significant involvement of the membership. Similar to a company Intranet, your website can support your continuing activities such as membership and retention, programs, newsletter distribution, and intra-Board and membership communications. In other words, an effective website should support doing more in less time and expense. It also can be a means of increasing membership participation in Council activities.

Managing your website:

• Commitment of the Council leadership: The Council President should take the lead and insist that website capabilities are used to augment Council activities. For example, electronic distribution of newsletters and meeting notices can both reduce Council expenses and increase membership awareness of Council programs. In addition, taking online payments for dues, event registrations and fund raising for worthy causes can increase results. Because of this, your Council website contact must report to the Board and its key officers.
• Conducting website operations - Your Webmaster: You will need to designate a "webmaster" -- the single person who acts as the interface between the leadership and having the website present/support Council activities (e.g., get the latest meeting notice posted, sending and archiving your newsletters, collecting payments/contributions, etc.). Ideally this will be a member of the Board or someone very familiar with the Council and its activities. You next will have to adopt an approach to Conducting website operations.
• Your Hosting: Your website must reside on a server (computer) which is connected to the Internet (and Internet Service Provider - ISP). You need to have reliable, secure and responsive support.
• Conducting website operations - Your Applications Support: You need to have a web site to support the display of your Council information and other communication/ distribution functions. Such webs are a combination of electronic pages and computer programs (a web design function) that ultimately should be managed by a computer professional - an Application Service Provider (ASP).
• Conducting website operations - Putting It All Together: Once you have a connection to Internet, and a website with your Council-specific information included, you need to keep your site alive with current and new information. Normally this is the function of the Webmaster.  However, posting information to the site and keeping it current requires a bit of technical knowledge. Fortunately, today's technology supports website updating, greatly reducing the amount of technical know how required.  Anyone who can use a word processor can easily update the website.

Our Services:

• Your Navy League is aware that each Council may have differing support requirements and accordingly has identified a number of providers who have the requisite range technology skills, resources and knowledge of Navy League Council operations to support your needs.
• Best Managers on the Net has been identified as one of those providers. We have incorporated capabilities in our web site design and support package that can meet most Councils needs. We pioneered in the field of web-based site management -- and each of the features we offer are low cost, reliable and proven. What follows is a short discussion of each.
• Email Support. Your hosting service includes unlimited web based email accounts. For the basic site we provide emails for the President, Secretary and Webmaster.
• Newsletter distribution. Many Councils are developing their newsletters using word processor or publisher software. These can be posted at the site.  The newsletter can be converted to the Adobe pdf file format (universal -- and there is a free reader) and emailed to members.. An emerging trend is to distribute newsletters as an email (which can be formatted similar to a web page using html -- web computer code language -- to produce a very attractive product).  The very latest approach is to develop the newsletter as a web page and send out an email with a link to the newsletter page.
• Website Update. Our Navy League Council template has been designed to support direct Council site updates using our built-in web site content manager.
• Our Mission is Your Support. Our function is to make your website further the Navy League mission. We will do whatever is necessary to make your web site help you and your Council produce results.

Managing Website Content:

• Managing Your Content. To retain maximum formatting capability, each data entry block supports full html submissions.
• Click here for tutorials.

*Many fields are not yet in use. Your webmaster can add such fields to new pages added to the site. The database map should be updated with each new addition.