Rotary District 9750 - Web Site Guide
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A Host for your Site:

Web pages are not much use unless people can access them, so they must be hosted on a web server.

While RDU has arranged Rotarnet as a resource and host site for Australasia, you are free to arrange with anyone to host your site. Just let the District Web Master know the address to put a link on your Club's entry in the listing of district clubs. Either way, you will also need to log onto the RI site to add your club's site to the list of Rotary Web sites there.

At the time of writing Rotarnet costs a reasonable $75 pa (with a once off $25 set up fee) for Rotary Clubs, or $50 pa (plus $15 set up) for Rotaract, Interact and similar young people's clubs. Part of the fees for Rotarnet come back to Rotary.

Reminder that included with the annual fee for a Rotarnet web site you get your Club e-mail address, and can also request a simpler shortcut home page address, which is part of the deal - but you must ASK for it see below). Nepean Blue, the Rotarnet operators, or many others, will also design and if needed maintain a web site for you, at a cost of course depending on the complexity and amount of work, or you can use templates available there or elsewhere to fill in the blanks for a simple site. To explore further options, like your own Domain name, first see the Internet page from the District Directory or the Rotarnet Services page by clicking on the links at left, or contact Rotarnet by e-mail to .

District Directory Internet Page

There are free host sites available out there, but there are two possible concerns that comes with them:
1. Free sites sometimes bring unsavoury neighbours, causing the domain to be black listed, with the result that users just cannot get to the site if their ISP subscribes to the black list. It is not that it will always happen, but it has occurred in the past.
2. Such sites usually come with quite prominent advertising, over which the users have little control, and which often byt the positioning assumes more significance than the user would always be happy with.

What do you mean by a shortcut page?

A real example that you can try to see the difference:
The Rotary Club of Sutherland's Rotarnet web site is actually located at:
http://rotarnet.com.au/users/9/97544/
but their shortcut page is simply
rotarnet.com.au/Sutherland         and makes a good match for their club e-mail address:
ClubName@rotarnet.com.au
and note that since both use a standard home page name (eg index.htm, index.html, index.asp, index.php or similar) then you DO NOT ned to specify that, so don't make it more complicated than needed. Only include the page name if it is actually needed to get that page loaded, an example is the club list page on this site.

Using the full link will take you straight to their site's home page, but it is hopeless to remember.
Using the shortcut link, takes you to a shortcut page which automatically passes the user on to the home page. The shortcut is a lot easier to remember and type, especially in combination with the mirror image e-mail address, and the automatic re-direction takes only a few seconds. So ask for it and use it for all club promotion and listings, and display it on your home page.

Can I have a counter of visitors and track statistices of page usage?

Some host packages come with some tracking included, some (including own domain sites through Rotarnet) provide access to usage logs (but are tedious to make any sense of), but most (including regular Rotarnet sites) do not.
Fear not, there are a number of counter and statistics sites out there, just do a web search and you will get a large number of results. These sites are just a couple of examples, are FREE, and have been used by us:

• Sitemeter.com provides a number of styles of visible visit counters for your home page (like the one on this site), which once registered requires a small piece of code inserted just on the pages to have a counter included and be tracked.
• Statcounter.com a much newer service which provides a mix of visible and invisible counters and statistics, requiring a piece of code to be inserted on every page to be tracked (this also operates on this whole site to give detail on page usage, referring pages, exit pages etc). More elaborate details are available at a cost, but the free service is adequate for most users.