Mercedes-Benz Club of America
Option A - host a section site on the National server. You can request site setup from Renee at the National Business Office.
- This service is provided free to the sections by National
- Your URL (web address) will be www.mbca.org/section_name - i.e. www.mbca.org/san_francisco_bay
- There are limits on the storage and bandwidth you can use for your section site
- 100mb storage - this is the space your files consume on the server hard drive
- 100mb bandwidth - this is the traffic to your web site
- Email accounts are not available
Option B - host the section site on a different server
Find out more about web hosting.
- There are many different hosting options, but all will incur a monthly hosting charge
- You must also buy a domain name when using this option, this will cost about $10 per year
- Email accounts may be available, depending on which hosting provider you choose
- You can choose a package that fits your needs for storage and bandwidth. This is probably a good choice if you want to run any web applications or upload large files for photos or videos
While creating web pages is not rocket science, it may be a difficult task for someone with no previous experience. You will need, at the minimum, software to connect to your web server via ftp, a good text editor, and an image editor for your graphics.
Some sections have had good luck using volunteers who know web design to develop and maintain their section sites. Some sections hire a professional web developer. Remember, the initial design of the site is only the beginning. You must maintain and update the pages in order to have valuable information available for your section members and prospective members. A site that has not been updated in the past 6 months may have their section link removed from the national site.
Software - You don't have to invest in expensive software in order to develop and maintain web pages. Below is a list of free software that you may find useful.
- Filezilla - the free ftp solution
- Pdf995 - create a .pdf file format by selecting the "print" command from any application.
- Interactive JPEG Optimizer - optimize your photos for fast load time and minimize file size
- PageBreeze - HTML Editor with both visual and HTML tag/source modes
HTML Resources - Hypertext Markup Language is used to code the actual web pages. Here are some good informational sites that will help you get started learning how to write HTML.
- webmonkey - the site that's been teaching people how to build websites of their own since 1996
- HTML Dog - resource for everything HTML and CSS, the most common technologies used in making web pages
Professional Developer - Please call the National Business Office at 1-800-637-2360 for contact information
File Size Guidelines - many of the visitors to the MBCA National site and the MBCA Section sites are still using dial-up connection. Pages that are heavy with large graphics or large .pdf files will download very slowly. A good rule of thumb is that if your visitor has to wait more than 4 seconds for the page to load you will probably lose them.
- Photos - A typical photo right off of the camera can be 2,000 KB to 5,000 KB or more, depending on the quality of the camera and the settings used. This would take a dial-up user between 4 and 11 minutes to download! By optimizing these photos to a size of 10KB or less, download times are reduced to about a second each. That means you could have 4 optimized photos on a page and still not go over the 4 second limit. You'll also reach storage limits on the web server much more slowly.
- PDFs - One easy way to get your section newsletter "online" is to convert it to a .pdf file. Be sure to compress and optimize it for the web. PDF files should be no larger than 2 MB.
- Videos - These files can get huge fast! We recommend that you upload your video files to YouTube and then link to them from your site. YouTube has advanced compression techniques and, best of all, it's free. You can find out everything you need to know here.