FAQs

The following information is provided to assist Councils get the most benefit from their website.

Council website functions:

• Public Education: The primary purpose of your website should be to help the Council further the Navy League and individual Council missions. In other words, it should supplement educating the public about the sea services. To do this is must be oriented to the public and be closely tied to the programs of the Navy League.
• Support of NLUS Programs: The "look and feel" of the site emulates the NLUS Headquarters site. In addition, we have included a section entitled "Our Sea Services" which is intended as a section devoted to information about national and local programs promoting the NLUS mission.
• Effective/efficient Council Operations: Council operations require the dedicated efforts of many volunteers and a significant involvement of the membership. Similar to a company Intranet, your website can support your continuing activities such as membership and retention, programs, newsletter distribution, and intra-Board and membership communications. In other words, an effective website should support doing more in less time and expense. It also can be a means of increasing membership participation in Council activities.

Managing your website:

• Commitment of the Council leadership: The Council President should take the lead and insist that website capabilities are used to augment Council activities. For example, electronic distribution of newsletters and meeting notices can both reduce Council expenses and increase membership awareness of Council programs. In addition, taking online payments for dues, event registrations and fund raising for worthy causes can increase results. Because of this, your Council website contact must report to the Board and its key officers.
• Conducting website operations - Your Webmaster: You will need to designate a "webmaster" -- the single person who acts as the interface between the leadership and having the website present/support Council activities (e.g., get the latest meeting notice posted, sending and archiving your newsletters, collecting payments/contributions, etc.). Ideally this will be a member of the Board or someone very familiar with the Council and its activities. You next will have to adopt an approach to Conducting website operations.
• Your Hosting: Your website must reside on a server (computer) which is connected to the Internet (and Internet Service Provider - ISP). You need to have reliable, secure and responsive support.
• Conducting website operations - Your Applications Support: You need to have a web site to support the display of your Council information and other communication/ distribution functions. Such webs are a combination of electronic pages and computer programs (a web design function) that ultimately should be managed by a computer professional - an Application Service Provider (ASP).
• Conducting website operations - Putting It All Together: Once you have a connection to Internet, and a website with your Council-specific information included, you need to keep your site alive with current and new information. Normally this is the function of the Webmaster.  However, posting information to the site and keeping it current requires a bit of technical knowledge. Fortunately, today's technology supports website updating, greatly reducing the amount of technical know how required.  Anyone who can use a word processor can easily update the website.

Our Services:

• Your Navy League is aware that each Council may have differing support requirements and accordingly has identified a number of providers who have the requisite range technology skills, resources and knowledge of Navy League Council operations to support your needs. 
• Best Managers on the Net has been identified as one of those providers. We have incorporated capabilities in our web site design and support package that can meet most Councils needs. We pioneered in the field of web-based site management -- and each of the features we offer are low cost, reliable and proven. What follows is a short discussion of each.
• Email Support. Your hosting service included unlimited web based email accounts. These accounts have full functionality with the exception that you cannot down load emails from the account. Most users have their web based council account mail forwarded to their own private account. This has the advantage of passing those communications through the powerful spam filters provided by the hosting service.
• List server and electronic notifications.  The lowest cost, secure electronic approach to intra-board communications and membership notifications is through secure list server support provided through your hosting service. You can maintain multiple lists, each with controlled access. Several lists such as Board, Executive_Committee and Member_Notifications should cover most needs.
• Newsletter distribution. Many Councils are developing their newsletters using word processor or publisher software. These can be converted to the Adobe pdf file format (universal -- and there is a free reader) and posted for download from the website. An emerging trend is to distribute newsletters as an email (which can be formatted similar to a web page using html -- web computer code language -- to produce a very attractive product).  The very latest approach is to develop the newsletter as a web page and send out an email with a link to the newsletter page. Our services support each of these methods.
• Website Update. Our Navy League Council template has been designed to support direct Council site updates using our built-in web site content manager. We developed the site using the popular FrontPage software. This means that it is a snap to maintain. For those not FrontPage inclined, we have developed an alternate capability to post files -- including photos and other materials -- to the web using a free software tool that operates in a fashion similar to how you transfer files between locations on your own personal computer. 
• Our Mission is Your Support. Our function is to make your website further the Navy League mission. We will do whatever is necessary to make your web site help you and your Council produce results.

Managing Website Content:

• Using the InfoBit manager. To retain maximum formatting capability, each data entry block supports full html submissions. There are a number of ways to make entries. The easiest is to use basic html commands such as <p> for paragraphs, and <br> for line breaks. A full list of these commands is presented at the top of the Infobit editor page. For those having their own html editor, just edit in design view, then copy and paste the html from between the <body></body> tags. Members can obtain a free html editor at Download a FREE HTML Editor (recommended by Business Week)
  
• Click here for tutorials: a tour of your website, the html editor, your upload site and using the InfoBit manager to update your website.
  
• We have also provided an integrated online html editor with our file/graphic upload feature (click here and use the ID/password provided you). You can load new graphics, documents, downloads on the appropriate pages. You then use the link (we suggest copying the ones you plan on using to a Notepad file) and design your inputs using the design view, then click on  disable rich text, and copy the html and past to your edit box, then click OK, Results, then Return to Board Working area to return to the site.

*Many fields are not yet in use. Your webmaster can add such fields to new pages added to the site. The database map should be updated with each new addition.