Go for content on a site not style.

That's why I don't like any of mine as
there's nothing there I haven't read before.

Jason's scuba-addict.co.uk site with wall to wall
trip reports gets more hits in a day than a geek
site like mine gets in a month. He is providing
what people are looking for - destination
information that is NOT writen by an ad-copy man
who has never dived in his life.

What have you got to offer?

nigelH

Cheers for the feedback guys, some useful ideas there, especially the stuff
for sale and members area  - and I hadn't even seen the scuba-addict site.

Thanks again,

Jeff.

Depends what the site is - if its just basic information about the club
which never changes, then of course club members won't keep looking -
they've seen it before!  If you want club members to use it, you need to
have something there they will use.  Since all of our members have access to
the internet (even if its at the University rather than at home), then I'm
moving a lot of stuff online.  I'm in the process of creating a site for my
club, and we're planning to move a lot of our records onto that site to get
rid of the piles of paper all the exec members have at the minute.  Of
course we will keep printed records of important data, but a lot of it can
be moved to the site.  Things like member basic info, contact details, the
dive log sheets of what they've done with the club, records of what training
they've done with the club, money owed, trips coming up / past, photos,
meetings, socials, and basically anything we'd usually keep records about or
inform the club of will be available on the site.  The content is still
under the early stages of development, but the basic design is done, and i'm
currently working on the back-end database, which will end up being fairly
huge!
Basically, if you want club members to use the site, there has to be
something useful there to make them want to come back.  In our case, there
are a lot of members who can't easily get into the meetings every week,
making it a good information source, and it also makes things easier for the
club exec, since we'll be able to generate forms which our Students Union
want before trips that usually take ages to fill out - now we can just tick
the names of who's going and the web site and database can generate the
completed form each time.
Think of what you want, what will be useful, and work on that.  The site I'm
doing is very modular, making it very very easy to add new sections to the
basic site, and new databases and things are equally easy to add or remove
after we've used the site for a few months.

David