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Home | tutorial home | Your own domain name

Your club area within the RIBIT site is difficult to remember; RC Conwy's, for example, is http://www.rotary-ribi.org/clubs/homepage.php?ClubID=1103

The ideal solution is to have your own domain name. Conwy has www.conwyrotary.org which points to the same place, and is obviously much easier to remember and publicise.

A .org address will cost about £10 p.a. or a .org.uk about £10 for two years. You will need to register the name yourself - it is not a service provided by the template. IF YOU REGISTER A DOMAIN NAME, MAKE SURE IT IS REGISTERED ON BEHALF OF YOUR CLUB, not an individual member; should a dispute arise, the legal owner is then the club, not the individual.

Usually when you register a domain you can opt to point the domain to another place and you also get email addresses based on that domain, so you could have president@yourclub.org, secretary@yourclub.org etc

However, if your district uses the '1170 membership database extension (MDE) they can supply a domain name in the format clubname.rotaryXXXX.org which is free of charge (where XXXX is you district number). These names take a while to set up and are not done automatically!

IMPORTANT - your own domain name should point to the long address and not hide (or 'mask') the true URL. So, when you click www.conwyrotary.org note that the long URL is displayed in the address bar. Do not use 'masked' (sometimes called 'framed') forwarding which keeps you domain name in the address bar. This can cause problems for members logging in and it's much more difficult to link to specific pages if you can't see the true URL.

Chris Sweeney

Template Designer