Your own domain name

Your club area within the Rotary GB&IT 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 is using the template and ownership of the domain name lies with Rotary GB&I, a facility is available which will enable role-based email forwarding; for example, email sent to president@clubname.rotary1234.org would be automatically diverted to the president's registered email address. You would also get a domain name in the format clubname.rotary1234.org - however, these aren't as concise and flexible as having your own domain!

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 your 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, also, it will cause your website to fail Google's 'mobile compatible' check.

Chris Sweeney

Template Designer