website

Ever wonder how you could enhance your group's online presence? Can't remember the last time your website received a good spring-clean? Never fear, our brand new Website Health Check is here!

An exciting new tool specially developed for member groups, our Health Check is designed to help you find out if you are making the most of your group's site, or whether it can be improved. The tool also assesses how effective your group’s website may be in helping you to recruit new members.

We know that designing, or redesigning, a website can be a scary task. But with time, some thought and a bit of creativity, almost anyone can produce a good website. If you can use Word or Facebook or Google, you can do this too!

In part one of our three-part guide on creating a website, we'll cover the important bit that often gets left out: planning!

We've put together some guides on how to maximise the use of your Making Music account, including how to manage your group via Manage My Group, advertise events and vacancies, and change your personal mailing preferences and saved pages.

How to update your group contacts
This explains how you can manage your group through the My Dashboard area of our website; this includes inviting new members to join you on Making Music and setting website permissions

At the risk of making you click away from this page in horror, we do need to start by citing that old cliché about a picture being worth a thousand words! No amount of cheerful prose will convince visitors to your group’s website that you are a joyful and inspiring group if they are confronted with a gloomy portrait.

In the final part of our three-part guide on creating a website, we'll cover ways to increase the visibility of your website to bring in more visitors; something worth thinking about before you start to build your site, as well as when you're looking to make ongoing improvements to it in the future.

We'll start by looking at how to make sure your pages are appealing to search engines, move on to using social media and inbound links, then cover how you can apply for free advertising from Google and finally look at ways to monitor your progress.

Now that you've worked out what you and your users both need on your website (see part 1), you're ready to move on to what it might look like and how you might display your content to users. Whether you're creating it from scratch, choosing a ready-made template or paying a professional, these tips will help you evaluate your design options and make your site as effective as possible.