magnusfeuer

So the forum layout would be something like: For Sale Idle talk Technical Questions National events Left Coast --Events --Local talk --Joints, Bongs and Sevens East Coast --Local talk --Manhattan pot hole slalom --Events --Snow chain racing South --... CCC would migrate all posts and logins to the new national site and its software (which can be vBulletin if we transfer our license to you). We would redirect all traffic to www.californiacaterhamclub.com/chat to the national site's california forum. The CCC site would then be redesigned to contain photos, videos, documents and articles from our local events. We have at least one member (Clark) who is a good writer and sometimes publishes his work in Low Flying. Have we thought about a blog/newsletter section on the national site? /Magnus F.

Hmm. We can do two different things, depending on the level of integration. We in the CA club can retain our local site (after migrating the forum to the national server), which means that there would be a link from www.whateversevens.com to www.californiacaterhamclub.com and our local content. Another solution would be a subdomain (www.california.whateversevens.com) or a subdirectory (www.whateversevens.com/california) which is hosted on the national site and also has a design that is compatible with the main one. This would push more system administration work to the maintainer of the central site, but would also give the entire club, chapters and all, a more streamlined appearance on the web. Compare >www.nasaproracing.com, having completely integrated regions, with SCCA where >www.scca.com has a completely different feel than its SoPAC region at >http://www.scca-sopac.org/ I am trying to list our alternatives here, not push one option in front of the other. /Magnus F. magnusfeuer2006-09-07 15:26:03

Magnus Feuer here... I am the web admin of the California Caterham Club. We just opened a local discussion about joining a national club effort at: >http://www.californiacaterhamclub.com/chat/showthread.php?p=4120 Please note that we haven't really started the debate yet, so anything I say at this point is my personal opionion only. Are there any models for how to integrate local chapters and their web site (such as a California/Left coast one) into the motherrship site? A simple link is the easiest solution, but we would then have fragmented forums and other possible overlaps. The other extreme is that we dump our website completely and simply redirect to the mothership. In this case we need to transfer all our old posts and logins to the mothership. A look at NASA and their local regions shows that you can go from the central site to the regional while retaining the web design and page layot. The regional chapters seem mostly to organize the local events. Is this a model that we can adapt, or will the existing local clubs lose their identity? Obviously this discussion needs to be carried out at two levels, within the local club and on a national level in this thread. /Magnus F. magnusfeuer2006-09-07 11:21:57