WordPress for Toastmasters*Learn how to set up a website on Toastmost.org, the club website hosting service of the WordPress for Toastmasters project.
Introduction: Why You Should Upgrade Your Club Website (~9 minutes)
Understand the advantages of WordPress for Toastmasters as a marketing, recruiting, and organizational tool for your Toastmasters club.
For a comparison of Toastmost with the default option used by most clubs, see this testimonial by Loni Huff of Dungeons & Toast (the testimonial is also included at the end of lesson 2).
Lesson 1: How to Create a Toastmost Club Website (~23 minutes)
Learn how to create a Toastmasters club website from scratch, using the Toastmost.org service.
Lesson 2: Edit Your Home Page, Add a Blog Post (~19 minutes)
Now that you have your Toastmasters club website, it’s time to show the world what makes it special. Learn how to use the WordPress editor for web pages and blog posts. These are techniques you can also apply to creating a personal or small business website base on WordPress.
Lesson 3: Using and Organizing Meeting Agendas (~11 minutes)
Learn how to sign up for meeting roles, assign them to others, and reorganize the agenda to match how your club works.
Lesson 4: Email Forwarders and Other Settings (~17 minutes)
Your Toastmost.org website includes role-based email forwarders like demo-president@toastmost.org to write to the president of demo.toastmost.org. You can add custom forwarders associated with your website, a mailing list for other club members, and other enhancements like an autoresponder for messages from your club’s Find a Club page on toastmasters.org.
For more on configuring online payments for dues collection, see this knowledge base article (which also includes a video).
Lesson 5: Add a Page, Change the Menu and Design (~24 minutes)
Going beyond your home page, you can create any number of additional marketing and educational pages of your website. Here’s how to create them and then add them to the website menu. You can also change design elements of your website such as the content included in the header of every page or the colors used throughout the site.
Once again, these are techniques you can learn through your club website and apply to a personal website or one you might manage for a small business or nonprofit.
Lesson 6: Search Engine Optimization and Other Enhancements (~11 minutes)
To make your website more useful, make it as easy as possible for people to find it on search or from a social media post. WordPress has a lot of good characteristics for search engine optimization (SEO) baked in. The techniques shown here are based on the Yoast SEO plugin for search engine optimization and social media integration, an add-on to WordPress.
This lesson also covers use of WordPress plugins, including those enabled by default on every Toastmost site, as well as the optional plugins you can activate for use on your Toastmasters website.
P.S. After recording the video, I went back to add a social media image to the home page so that a link posted to Facebook or Twitter will display more nicely. Here’s what that process of sharing to Facebook looks like.
