The Texas Young Republican Federation has rolled out a new “website in a box” program.  This program provides for free hosting on the state website, and will provide a club with their own fully-functional wordpress website that already incorporates a variety of best practices in club design.  The website can be unrolled and tweaked for a particular club in about 48 hours time.  This will allow club officers to focus on *running* their club, having successful events, and attracting new members, instead of on designing a website or other activities which distract from preparing for the 2012 elections.

To see an example of this website, go here: newclub.texasyoungrepublicans.com. The website incorporates the following features and / or best practices, ready to go:

  • A blog for events and announcements is included, which displays on the landing page
  • A list of upcoming events displays on the landing page
  • Mailing list sign up form (integrates with a free account at Mailchimp)
  • Facebook fan page “like” box. If someone is logged into Facebook, and they have friends who like your club’s fan page, they will see their friends in the “like” box.
  • Twitter Feed – can be customized to show tweets from the club or any number of people or hashtags on twitter
  • Automatically cross-post updates on the blog to your club’s twitter and Facebook Fan page
  • Contact Form for visitors to email the club
  • Donation box, ready to be tied into Paypal
  • WordPress Backend – completely segregated from the backend of the main state website, club officers would be able to access and update their own posts, events, and additional pages and menu buttons, and further customize the website to their heart’s desire.

If a new club would like this website, we could host it on the state website for free, in which case, the club would have an address like “yourclub.texasyoungrepublicans.com”. The club can take their template with them when they are ready to  move things to their own website. If you would like to see the backend of the template where the controls are to update the website, please email chairman@texasyoungrepublicans.com for the access information.

Mark C. Brown
Chairman, Texas Young Republican Federation