In late 2000 or early 2001, I discovered a one page Web presence for the Village Card Club on a local realtors' site. The information was 2 years out-of-date. It consisted of a game schedule and a short history of the club.
I updated the information and moved the site to my personal Web space. Several club members thought that we should have our own domain name. The domain name was obtained (villagecardclub.org) and the 2-page site was moved to a commercial server.
As various members made requests, and as I saw the need for additional content, pages were added to the site. At some point, Frank Matthews and others requested posting games on the site. This effort greatly increased server utilization. Cindy Devish provided an increased amount of content during her presidency.
Although, an experienced programmer, Web programming was new to me. Over the last years, I have learned a tremendous amount about building and operating a Web site. Many of the pages viewed on the site employ server side processing. The recent addition of the Partnership application is an example. The partnership application was suggested by a member of the Little Rock duplicate club. (I also maintained the Little Rock site at that time.)
The site is a resource for all members of the Village Card Club. As a sub site, there is a small presence for Unit 161. www.villagecardclub.org/unit161. Here you will find the unit officers plus the constitution and bylaws of the Unit. In late 2007, I created a separate site for Unit 161 (www.unit161.org). Items of interest to the entire Unit will be posted there.
More recently, the minutes of the board meetings including the treasurer's reports were posted on the site increasing the membership access to the board of directors and their activities.
During 2007 and 2008, a database was added to the site. The first function was to allow a member lookup. By 2009, the database contained dues information as well as address, telephone number, etc. The database is attached to the web site and several pages have data added dynamically from the database. No longer do these pages have to be updated by a programmer. The database has an administrative back end where the Membership Director or other individual can update membership data with out a programmer being necessary.
Richard Robertson, webmaster, January 2009