Get a Great Looking Club Website on Toastmost.org

New default designs for Toastmost.org websites

If you sign up for a new club website at Toastmost.org, it will be launched with the kind of dramatic presentation shown here — which you and your club webmaster can further enhance. You can have a great looking website in combination with innovative agenda management tools and features specifically designed to support online and hybrid clubs.

The design theme you see in the upper left of the image above (Twenty Nineteen TM) is the new default on Toastmost, but you can easily switch to one of the other supported themes.

All of the Toastmost.org themes have been reviewed for compliance with Toastmasters International brand guidelines, but each also provides you with a great deal of flexibility to make your site look the way you want it to. Some themes allow you to set a header image that appears throughout the site. The two shown above allow you to set a different featured image for each page.

To change the default featured image associated with your home page, go to the Featured Image section of the Page properties sidebar of the WordPress editor as shown here.

The Twenty Twenty TM theme makes similarly dramatic use of featured images but also allows you to display them with or without the “Cover Template” format where it covers the whole top of the screen. Here’s what it looks like with that feature turned off.

Variety Within the Twenty Nineteen TM Theme

These sample home page designs were created using publicity photos from the Toastmasters International gallery of branded images. The exception is the first one on the list, which was created using an image obtained by searching Pixabay, the free public images repository, for “public speaking.”

As of May 2021, new club websites on Toastmost will get one of these images picked at random as a starting point. Club leaders are encouraged to change the default choice to one representing the character of their own club. This particular WordPress theme (design) shows featured images stylized with a blue filter, but here are some examples of how it looks with different featured images.

Changing the Theme

When logged in as administrator, you can change the design theme used by your website by clicking Customize on the black menu bar at the top of the screen, then choosing the Themes panel within the Customize tool.

With some of these themes, you would find Header Image as one of the options you can set to add a featured image to the top of the page. For example, as of this writing Digital Communicators uses the Twenty Seventeen TM theme in combination with a futuristic image of the earth from space pulled straight from a NASA image gallery.