I've been resurrecting our IAC chapter website using EAA's new chapter website capabilities. (For those of you who may not know, International Aerobatic Club chapters are EAA chapters; all IAC members are EAA members).
As I understand it, every EAA chapter formerly on the Webs.com "platform" must migrate to the new Sitecore platform by the end of March.
I watched Charlie Becker's webinar, which gave me a great start as a novice in using website-building software. The folks at eaa.chapters have been supportive and responsive (thanks again, Megan).
I'd like to share ideas and solutions with other "early adopters" and the website-curious.
As an IAC chapter, our needs are somewhat different than a typical EAA chapter. Most of the EAA-provided templates don't meet our requirements, so I've been building IAC-specific pages based on the "generic chapter page" template. I'm happy to share the HTML code for these with other chapters (although you can easily just copy, paste, and tailor our text for your use).
Features under development include: we'd like to have online registration for Chapter (in contrast to IAC/EAA) membership, our aerobatics camp, and judges school. Charlie's webinar explains how to use PayPal to collect fees for these events and contests, but there's no "form" available from EAA. I'm trying to get up to speed on HTML Forms, but if anyone has open source forms HTML/CSS/Javascript that I could adapt, I'd appreciate it. I'm happy to share anything that I develop.
One puzzling aspect with which EAA is helping: a search for IAC67, aerobatics in Washington, and variants on these search strings doesn't return our site (although it does return our Facebook page). I've watched and applied the suggestions from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) YouTube videos. However, my impression is that the chapters.eaa.org/IACnn URLs may be protected by a security feature that I'm too ignorant to understand.
We also want to have the "traditional" IAC chapter URL (iac67.org) assigned to our site in the hope that more prospective aerobatic pilots will find us, not just to attract prospective new members, but for IAC members who want to reconnect to the mothership or attend our functions.
If you're curious about our site (or aerobatics: the site includes "intro" and "getting started" pages), the current URL is https://chapters.eaa.org/iac67
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by mamontb
