How to Get a Free Website for Your Scout Pack and Help With Yearly Turnover
Cub Scout and Boy Scout packs need websites to help recruit new scouts and keep the existing scouts informed.
This article will show you how getting a Google Apps account for your pack will help it to create its own free website as well as allow the Pack to collaborate and retain year to year knowledge.
Scout packs have a great need for document sharing and easily editable websites.
One of the reasons for this is the regular turn over of the volunteer leadership.
If you have a need for documents that everyone can update and that stay in one place year to year, then you could use Google Documents.
Our Pack is set up so that we create a document for each event, everybody that helps with the event has access to see it.
They can find out what was done the previous year, and what worked well and what didn't.
It makes organizing events much easier then reinventing the wheel each time.
Google Apps Standard accounts are available free of charge for groups of 50 or less people.
The Standard accounts give you access to Google's calendar, email, on-line documents and sites.
All of the email is tied to the domain you register your Google Apps account with.
So for example, if you own the domain "Pack92.
org", your users email will be "username@pack92.
org".
Also, all the user administration and security is easier, for example if you are creating documents or sites, you can chose to share them with everyone in the domain, which means every user you add to your Google Apps account.
Importantly for this article, Google Sites can be configured so that only the people you add to your Apps account can view it, or the site can be made public.
Farther down I will show you how you can easily configure your Google Apps account so that the Google Site you want to make public is accessible as your domain name.
Some of the benefits of using a Google Site for your public website are: the site is easy to maintain by nontechnical as well as technical people, you can easily add functionality to the site through the addition of gadgets, and there are many types of pages you can create.
So with yearly turnover, there is minimal training for the new webmaster to get up to speed.
With Google Sites, its easy to keep your site up to date and useful.
You can create a public calendar and embed it into the site pages so people can see what is coming up.
You can create a page of uploaded documents, an announcement page, a page that has custom lists, and many others.
Google also allows gadgets, which allows you embed an almost unlimited number of different object, including local weather boxes and many more.
I hope this article has shown your the many benefits of using Google Apps for your Cub Scout or Boy Scout Pack.
I also hope that you have seen the benefit of configuring a free Google Site for your public website.
Here is a link to more detailed directions on how to configure the Google Sites admin and your domain settings to make a Google Site your free public website.
This article will show you how getting a Google Apps account for your pack will help it to create its own free website as well as allow the Pack to collaborate and retain year to year knowledge.
Scout packs have a great need for document sharing and easily editable websites.
One of the reasons for this is the regular turn over of the volunteer leadership.
If you have a need for documents that everyone can update and that stay in one place year to year, then you could use Google Documents.
Our Pack is set up so that we create a document for each event, everybody that helps with the event has access to see it.
They can find out what was done the previous year, and what worked well and what didn't.
It makes organizing events much easier then reinventing the wheel each time.
Google Apps Standard accounts are available free of charge for groups of 50 or less people.
The Standard accounts give you access to Google's calendar, email, on-line documents and sites.
All of the email is tied to the domain you register your Google Apps account with.
So for example, if you own the domain "Pack92.
org", your users email will be "username@pack92.
org".
Also, all the user administration and security is easier, for example if you are creating documents or sites, you can chose to share them with everyone in the domain, which means every user you add to your Google Apps account.
Importantly for this article, Google Sites can be configured so that only the people you add to your Apps account can view it, or the site can be made public.
Farther down I will show you how you can easily configure your Google Apps account so that the Google Site you want to make public is accessible as your domain name.
Some of the benefits of using a Google Site for your public website are: the site is easy to maintain by nontechnical as well as technical people, you can easily add functionality to the site through the addition of gadgets, and there are many types of pages you can create.
So with yearly turnover, there is minimal training for the new webmaster to get up to speed.
With Google Sites, its easy to keep your site up to date and useful.
You can create a public calendar and embed it into the site pages so people can see what is coming up.
You can create a page of uploaded documents, an announcement page, a page that has custom lists, and many others.
Google also allows gadgets, which allows you embed an almost unlimited number of different object, including local weather boxes and many more.
I hope this article has shown your the many benefits of using Google Apps for your Cub Scout or Boy Scout Pack.
I also hope that you have seen the benefit of configuring a free Google Site for your public website.
Here is a link to more detailed directions on how to configure the Google Sites admin and your domain settings to make a Google Site your free public website.
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