$1 per month GoDaddy hosting for WordPress-powered Toastmasters sites

If you would like to run your own WordPress-powered Toastmasters website, GoDaddy is currently offering a bargain rate of $1 per month for the first year for new registrations. Read the fine print for yourself, but it looks like a good deal.

The type of free hosting I offer through wp4toastmasters.com is simpler for me, as well as for the clubs I am working with. But running a website at your own domain has its own advantages, particularly if you have some web-savvy techies in your club who can take full advantage of it.

To replicate the functions available through wp4toastmasters.com, you would install the free RSVPMaker and RSVPMaker for Toastmasters plugins, which are available in the wordpress.org repository. The easiest way to add them is through the administrator’s dashboard in WordPress.

There are several Toastmasters-branded WordPress themes, including the couple that you can download from the links below. I’m trying to get these two listed in the WordPress.org repository, which would make it easier to add them from the administrator’s dashboard, rather than having to download them, upload them onto a web server, and then activate them.

Note: I have stopped promoting web hosting services of my own here, partly due to lack of interest as well as a concern about Toastmasters International rules. I am seeking alternate ways of offsetting the costs of this project.

Toastmasters-branded Themes

A WordPress theme is a set of WordPress templates that establish the design of a website, including details like fonts and color schemes. The ones listed below are what are called child themes, meaning they are variations on standard WordPress themes. They add Toastmasters branding, but otherwise allow you all the freedom to customize you would get with the “parent” theme.

Every year, the developers and designers behind WordPress publish a new default theme, and these are child themes for Twenty Twelve and the just-released Twenty Fifteen.

Toasty is the active theme you see on demo.wp4toastmasters.com and allows you to choose between 8 Toastmasted branded banners, which appear at the top of the page along with your club (or area, division, or district) name. You must also have Twenty Twelve installed.

Toasty Teen is a more minimal theme, based on Twenty Fifteen, and is designed to work well on mobile devices. See the screenshot below (click to see larger).