Someone Googles your club’s name. Maybe they heard about you from a neighbor, or they saw a flyer at the library. They type your name into a search bar and get… nothing. Or worse, they find a Facebook page that hasn’t been updated since 2021 and a dead link to a GoDaddy parking page.
They close the tab. You just lost a member and didn’t even know it.
Or maybe your club does have a website. It’s a WordPress site the previous secretary built in 2018. The homepage still says “Welcome to our 2017-2018 season!” The events page lists a potluck that happened four years ago. The “Join Us” link goes to a form nobody checks. That’s actually worse than nothing, because it signals that your club is inactive.
You don’t need a complex website. You need five pages that answer five questions: Who are you? What do you do? When do you meet? How do I join? How do I contact you? That’s it. And you can build the whole thing in a weekend.
Does Your Club Actually Need a Website?
Yes. Next question.
Okay, let me back up. You might be thinking, “We’ve got a Facebook group and a WhatsApp chat. Everybody knows everybody. Why bother?”
Three reasons.
Credibility. When someone hears about your club and goes looking, a real website makes you look real. A Facebook-only presence makes you look temporary. This matters especially if you’re applying for grants, booking venues, or partnering with local businesses. The person across the desk wants to see a .org URL, not a Facebook group with 43 members.
Google findability. People search for things like “hiking club near me” or “Bengali cultural association Portland.” Facebook groups don’t rank well in Google results. A simple website with the right words on it does. If you’re trying to attract new members, you need to exist where people are looking. (We’ve written more about how the membership software market is shifting toward tools that help with exactly this kind of discoverability.)
Independence. Facebook changes its algorithm. Instagram buries your posts unless you pay. WhatsApp groups max out at 1,024 people. Your website belongs to you. Nobody else’s decisions can bury it or shut it down.
What to Put on Your Website (and What to Leave Off)
The biggest mistake clubs make with websites? Trying to put everything on them. Event photos, newsletters, committee meeting minutes, bylaws, a blog nobody writes, a forum nobody uses. The result is a bloated site that takes forever to build and never gets updated.
You need five pages. Five.
1. Home / About. One page. Your club’s identity, what you do, who it’s for. Two or three paragraphs max. A group photo if you have one. Your meeting schedule. Done.
2. Events. Your next two or three upcoming events. Not a searchable archive of every event since 2015. Just what’s happening soon. Include dates, times, locations, and a sentence about what to expect if you’re new.
3. How to Join. The single most important page on your site. Make the path to membership dead obvious. If you charge dues, say how much. If there’s a form, link directly to it. Don’t have one yet? You can put together a customized membership form for free and link straight to it. Don’t make people click through three pages to figure out how to give you money.
4. Contact. An email address. Maybe a phone number. Your mailing address if you have one. Don’t use a contact form unless you’re certain someone checks it regularly. An email address is simpler and more reliable.
5. Links. Your Facebook page, Instagram, newsletter signup, any other places people can find you. This page is optional. You could also just put these links in the footer of every page.
That’s the whole site. No blog (unless someone genuinely wants to write one and will actually keep it updated). No members-only section. No photo galleries. You can always add those later. Right now, you’re building the minimum site that makes your club findable, credible, and digital.
Which Tool Should You Use?
You’ve got four solid free or cheap options. I’ll be direct about the tradeoffs.
Google Sites (free)
The easiest option. If anyone on your board has a Gmail account, they already have access. Drag-and-drop editor, clean templates, and it’s genuinely hard to make something ugly with it. Your site lives at sites.google.com/view/your-club-name, which isn’t ideal, but you can connect a custom domain for about $12/year.
Downsides: limited design flexibility, no built-in forms (you’ll embed a Google Form), and the sites look a little generic. But for a club that just needs a clean, functional web presence? Google Sites gets you there in a few hours.
Carrd ($19/year for Pro, limited free tier)
Carrd is a one-page website builder. Your entire site lives on a single scrollable page with sections. Pro costs $19/year (not per month, per year), which gets you custom domains, forms, and multiple sites. It’s designed for simplicity. If the idea of managing multiple pages sounds like more than your club needs, Carrd might be perfect.
Downsides: it’s literally one page. If you want separate pages for events, about, and joining, you’ll use anchor sections that simulate multiple pages by showing and hiding content.
WordPress.com (free tier)
The classic. WordPress powers a staggering percentage of the web, and the free tier gives you a real multi-page site. You’ll get a yourclub.wordpress.com subdomain. The block editor is pretty intuitive now, and there are dozens of free themes that work well for clubs and organizations.
Downsides: the free tier shows WordPress ads on your site. You can’t install custom plugins. Removing ads and connecting a custom domain costs $48/year (the Personal plan). The admin dashboard has a lot of menus and options, which can overwhelm someone who just wants to put up five pages.
Wix (free tier)
Wix’s drag-and-drop editor is the most visually flexible of the bunch. The free tier gives you a full site at yourname.wixsite.com/your-club. Plenty of templates designed specifically for clubs and organizations.
Downsides: the free tier includes Wix branding and ads. Custom domains start at $17/month (their cheapest paid plan), which is noticeably more expensive than the others. Wix sites can also load slowly if you go heavy on animations and images. Keep it simple.
Which one should you pick? If you want dead simple and free, use Google Sites. If you want polished and don’t mind $19/year, use Carrd. If you want a traditional multi-page site and you’re comfortable learning a bit more, use WordPress.com. If visual design matters most to you, use Wix, but expect to pay more for the custom domain.
Your Saturday/Sunday Plan
Block out about four hours on Saturday and two hours on Sunday. That’s all you need.
Saturday Morning: Build the Structure (2-3 hours)
Hour 1: Pick your tool and set up your account. Don’t agonize. Pick one from the list above and create an account. Choose a template that looks clean and professional. Don’t go down the template rabbit hole. Pick one that looks decent, is mobile-friendly, and move on.
Hour 2: Write your core content. Open a Google Doc or text file. Write your five sections:
- About paragraph (3-5 sentences about your club, what you do, when you meet)
- Upcoming events (your next 2-3 events with dates and times)
- How to join (dues amount, link to signup form or instructions)
- Contact information (email, phone, address)
- Social media links
Writing the content separately before putting it into the website builder saves you from fighting with formatting while trying to think about what to say. Get the words right first.
Hour 3: Put content into your site. Paste your content into the template. Add your club’s logo if you have one. Drop in a group photo. Set up your navigation menu (Home, Events, Join, Contact). Preview the site on both desktop and mobile.
Saturday Afternoon: Make It Look Right (1 hour)
Check on a phone. Pull up your site on your phone. More than half of web traffic comes from mobile devices. If your site looks great on a laptop but unreadable on a phone, fix it now. Most modern builders handle this automatically, but check anyway.
Proofread. Read every word out loud. Fix typos. Make sure the meeting time is correct. Make sure the dues amount is right. Triple-check that the “Join” link actually works. Have one other person look at it. Fresh eyes catch things you won’t.
Publish. Hit the publish button. Don’t wait. A published simple site is infinitely better than an unpublished perfect one.
Sunday: Domain Name and Connections (1-2 hours)
Morning: Domain name decision. You’ve got two choices.
Option A: Use the free subdomain your builder gives you (yourclub.wixsite.com, sites.google.com/view/yourclub). Free, instant, zero configuration. Perfectly fine if you just need something up and running. You can always add a custom domain later.
Option B: Buy a custom domain. yourclub.org looks more professional and is easier to remember and share. .org domains typically cost $10-15/year through registrars like Namecheap, Google Domains (now Squarespace Domains), or Cloudflare. A few tips on domain names:
- Go with
.orgfor a club or nonprofit. It signals “community organization” better than.com. - Keep it short.
portlandhikingclub.orgis better thanthe-official-portland-oregon-hiking-club.org. - Avoid hyphens if possible. They’re easy to forget when typing.
- Check if someone already owns the domain before you get attached to a name.
Each website builder has instructions for connecting a custom domain. It usually involves changing a couple of DNS records. Takes 15 minutes to configure and up to 48 hours to fully activate, though it’s usually live within an hour or two.
Afternoon: Connect to your tools. If your club uses a membership tool, link your “Join” button directly to your signup or registration page. If you use a Google Form for signups, embed it or link to it. If you collect dues online, link directly to your payment page. Every click between “I want to join” and the actual signup form is a place where someone gives up.
Make sure your club’s email address is visible on the contact page. If you’re using Google Forms, test the form yourself, all the way through to the confirmation message.
What NOT to Do
The fastest way to kill your new website is to build something nobody will maintain. Some traps to avoid.
Don’t build a news section or blog. Unless you have a specific person who’s genuinely excited about writing regular updates, skip it. An empty blog with one post from 2024 is worse than no blog at all. If you want to share updates, do it on social media and link to your profiles from the site.
Don’t add a members-only section. Password-protected pages on a basic website builder are clunky, confusing, and usually broken. If you need a private member portal, that’s what membership management tools are for, not your club website.
Don’t use a site builder you can’t hand off. If you’re the only person who understands how to edit the website, what happens when you step down from the board? Pick a tool that someone else can figure out without a tutorial. Google Sites and Carrd are easy enough that almost anyone can update them.
Don’t try to match a corporate website. Your club website doesn’t need parallax scrolling, animated transitions, or a chatbot. Clean, readable, and up-to-date beats flashy and outdated every single time.
Don’t forget to tell people it exists. Sounds obvious. But plenty of clubs build a website, publish it, and then never share the URL. Post it in your group chat. Add it to your email signatures. Put it on your flyers. Mention it at the next meeting.
Who Maintains It After the Weekend?
Building the site takes a weekend. Keeping it alive takes about 20 minutes a month. Somebody needs to own this, and you should decide who before the weekend is over.
The maintenance job is small:
- Update the events page when new events are scheduled (10 minutes)
- Check that all links still work once a month (5 minutes)
- Update the dues amount or joining instructions if they change (5 minutes)
- Swap the group photo once a year if you want
That’s it. Write the maintainer’s name into your board roles document. If the maintainer leaves, hand the login credentials to the next person. This shouldn’t be one person’s secret project. It should be a simple, documented responsibility that transfers easily when people rotate off the board.
Most of the website-rot problems clubs deal with come from building more site than they can maintain. Five pages and a clear owner? That’s a site that’ll still be accurate in two years.
Connecting Your Website to Your Membership Tool
Your website answers “who are we and how do I join.” Your membership tool handles the actual joining: collecting information, tracking dues, managing member records. The two should connect cleanly.
The simplest connection is a link. Your website’s “Join” button points to your membership tool’s signup page. When someone clicks it, they leave your website and land on your tool’s registration form. Clean, simple, no coding required.
If you want something more polished, most membership tools let you embed a signup form directly on your website. This keeps visitors on your site while they fill out their information. Google Sites, WordPress, and Wix all support embedding external content through iframes or embed blocks.
The most important thing? Test the full path yourself. Go to your website on a phone. Click “Join.” Fill out the form. Complete the process. If anything is confusing, broken, or ugly at any step, fix it. That three-minute test will save you from losing every potential member who tries to join through your site.
Start Saturday Morning
You don’t need a web developer. You don’t need a $200/month subscription. You don’t need a committee to discuss it for three months.
You need a Saturday morning, a cup of coffee, and the willingness to publish something that’s good enough. Perfect is the enemy of a club that shows up on Google. Ship it, share the link, and move on to the work that actually matters: running your community.
Your club website drives interest, but your membership tool handles the follow-through. Somiti gives your club a member signup page, dues tracking, and event management, so you can link your “Join” button to something that actually works.