How to Make a Kiwanis Website
The Citrus Heights Kiwanis website is ready now, and it was created with a free Wordpress template distributed by the Kiwanis Organization itself. This is their official training website, which uses the same template, thoroughly documents their procedure, and provides a contact link if your Kiwanis club would like to do the same.
In their words:
This is the official Kiwanis Club Sites training website. If your district or club would like a free website, please contact us here, to get on the list
This template is based on the Givingpress lite theme, and is licensed under the GNU General Public License
The Key Information
You are probably here because you either want to know if the Kiwanis Wordpress template would make the most sense for your particular club, or because you already had them create a Wordpress website and are not sure how to use it.
If it is the latter, then they have provided very comprehensive documentation here. I will admit that I did not read all of it, as it is very long and (in my opinion) described a few intuitive things in great detail, but I did refer to this when doing a URL redirect and modifying our menu layout.
For any specific questions you have, they can be reached at helpline@kiwanis.org
If you just want general information, consider this:
- Not everyone in Kiwanis uses Wordpress, and not everyone in Kiwanis uses this template. Auburn, for example, uses Wix. Elk Grove had a professional web developer roll out a website from scratch using Bootstrap, as well as a few other technologies
- If you request it, the Kiwanis organization will create a website for you using the Wordpress template. If you already own a domain, you are free to do a URL redirect
- You can then edit this website using your wordpress.org account. Though you can hypothetically extend this template any way you would like, it comes with Facebook integration and Google Calendar integration out of the box
- The bullet above was just a dumb way to say that it was easy to integrate our website with our Facebook and with a google calendar id. Ours is currently configured to pull from our Facebook page as updates roll in
- It may go without saying, but any fees you require for a custom URL or your original Kiwanis membership fee still apply
- The template is open source!
A Few of the Tricky Parts
If you do not consider yourself a very tech-savvy person, don’t worry — none of this, thanks to the template, required any actual coding. I did write two lines of HTML to get the social media links to show up on the top left. Those should have had font awesome icons…not sure why they don’t. I will have to look into that.
Thankfully most of this was fairly intuitive, but I did have to refer to their webpage to read up on how to do menus. Basically you add some pages, find appearance on the left side panel, then click on menus.
At this point, you can move items around and set them as children of each other.
Next thing: Google Calendar just requires you to create your own calendar, then share it to this site.
The URL redirect is going to vary depending on how you are currently hosting your website. Our website, citrusheightskiwanis.org, was using Hoover. I used the procedure documented here.
Closing Thoughts
If you are a current member of Citrus Heights Kiwanis, we need more in the “What We Do” section! Please send me any writing and/or photos you may have. Every bit counts!
If you are living in Citrus Heights and are not currently a member of Kiwanis, join us.
To everyone else, please stay safe, stay healthy, and join a different Kiwanis club. We are everywhere.
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