PRINTABLE: Make a website for your Moms Group in just 7 easy steps
If you’re struggling to grow your Moms Group or Club, a free website is the way to go to advertise your group to potential new members. I designed a Blogger website for my Moms Group, the MOMS Club® of York, about 6 months ago; since then our website has received over 480 page views! We use it to advertise our public group events (like our Preschool Fair) as well as explain our membership benefits.
Since our website has been an incredibly helpful tool for my Moms Group, I wanted to share this step-by-step tutorial to help you with setting up your own free website.
So go ahead and put the kids to bed, grab a glass of wine and let’s get started!
A few quick things to note:
- Don’t get overwhelmed by how long this tutorial is! It’s long because I’ve included lots of screenshots so that we’re all on the same page. It’s not hard at all once you get the hang of it.
- Blogger is owned by Google and is very user friendly; you don’t need to know HTML or coding of an kind.
- With Blogger you don’t need to pay for or setup hosting or a domain registration. However if you already have purchased a domain name it isn’t too difficult to setup (depending on where you purchased it) and it’s free to add to Blogger.
- A blog is a little different from a traditional website. The “Pages” in Blogger are designed to be static (made once and then remain unchanged) so when you create “Posts” they are automatically placed at the top of your home page. You can’t place “Posts” on your other “Pages.” Another FYI – an attribution for Blogger and the template designer automatically appears at the footer (bottom)of your page.
- You’ll see the term “Gadgets” on the Layout tab. These are prewritten bundles of code that do different things on your site (make a poll, add videos, images, add a search box, etc). You can easily select your Gadgets and place them where you want them without having to know any coding at all.
- You will need a free Gmail account if you don’t have one already. Also, if you want to include an “About Me” section on your home page you will need to create a Google+ profile and add that info there. The photo used in your “About Me” section is also pulled from your profile. Don’t want to set it up? You can turn off this “About Me” gadget in the Layout tab and add an”About Me” Page instead.
- I used my husband’s Gmail account to create this tutorial so don’t be surprised if you see “Jacob” in the screenshots.
Start Here: Click here to download the 7-Step Tutorial
Questions? Feel free to contact me. I’ll try to help out any way I can!
Photo credit: Cathy Yeulet / 123RF Stock Photography
Photo credit: yuliyapopova / 123RF Stock Photography
