Top ten things not to do on your car club website
In researching car club websites for this project, I have noticed a few, shall we say, less than desirable practices. Some websites could be improved tremendously by just fixing some of these things. These are just my opinion of course, but I think most people would agree. Here are the top 10.
1) Don't overload the home page with photo's. You want the home page to load fast. Keep the "page weight" down and your dial up members will thank you.
2) Don't make the home page too busy. Have you ever noticed how Google has designed their home page? It is very simple. Nothing to detract you from the primary purpose. In the same way it is best to pick the most important information you want to convey to your members and display that information only.
3) Don't have blue writing on a red background. Pick a pleasant color scheme. If you are like me and are a bit color challenged, try one of the many color scheme generators that can be found for free on the web. Just google color scheme and find your favorite.
What is the Clubinator vision?
One thing I have figured out while researching car club websites is that car club people are really good at working on cars. Some of the designs are well shall we say sub optimal. Now don't get me wrong, as a developer I am naturally a bit design challenged, but even I know that bright blue text on a red background is not only disturbing but might actually be dangerous. Beyond the visual design issues there are frequent problems with usability, slow page loading, way too many graphics on a page, and other problems.
Even with all that, these websites serve a purpose. Their webmasters serve a purpose too, and that is to communicate information to the club members, and share pictures of the various events.
Here is the problem. The webmasters need specialized knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and a host of other technologies, and everything has to go through them. Having been building websites for a while now, I can tell you that building them is really fun. You learn a lot each time, and it is just fun to see something take form out of nothing.
Maintaining the site and posting content once it is built -- not so fun.
Clubinator Unveiled
Clubinator is content management/social networking software for clubs. Specifically, it is designed for car clubs, but that may change in the future. Clubinator is developed by Spellman Systems LLC. It a web application written in PHP using MySQL and JQuery.
Our current/initial project is at westsidecruisers.org check it out.