The New Boca Rotary Website

Weekly Meeting May 22nd, 2019

Pictured above is Past President Bill Riddick, CEO of the Riddick Family Enterprises, explaining to the Club the progress that’s been made to create a high quality website for the Boca Rotary Club with the help of Bob Buruchian and many others in club. 

Our Club had been using ClubRunner for many years until recently when it became slow and antiquated (via feedback from Claudia and other members). Bill added that he always had problems signing into the site’s backend and it was not always user friendly. 

This led our Club to initiate a project to create a new website for our Club. The Board of Directors set a goal to make a new website that was modern looking, user friendly, and helped organize our club. Some of the requirements were:

  • Include pages for each of our Signature Events with ability to buy tickets for these events online
  • Have informational pages about all of the active projects of our Club
  • Be able to pay member dues and guest lunches 
  • Purchase tickets to our club events and socials in addition to the Signature Events
  • Include a calendar of all of our events throughout the year (with ability to download to calendar for reference)
  • Post our weekly meeting summary stories along with the Club’s monthly newsletter with pictures
  • View members with photos
  • Include photo and video galleries

There were even more requests as we opened it up to feedback from the Club. Bill and Bob decided to roll out the site in phases. They say they are now done with Phase 1, which included the architecture/ frameworks of the site, home page, working calendar, signature events, and more. 

There are a number of reasons that we decided to build our new Club website from scratch using the WordPress platform. These include:

  • The Club would like a modern fully functional website like other modern Rotary Clubs have which are built on WordPress. 
  • Bob and Bill have worked on a number of WordPress sites from scratch built on the Avada WordPress theme. 
  • With all of the special features people wanted built in over time, WordPress gave Bill and Bob the best option for an open platform compared to ClubRunner’s limited capabilities.

We have added links to DACdb on the menu bar to point to information that can only be obtained from Rotary International. Bill and Bob will continue to look at ways to integrate Rotary International information either into or out of DACdb when appropriate. 

Bob and Bill still need a lot of help generating content for the website. This includes content for a lot of the past projects the club has worked on to writing our weekly/ monthly newsletters. Numerous Rotarians stepped up to help including Lee Tannenbaum, Dr. John Strausswimmer, Orin Rosenfeld, Neil Haynie, Spencer Siegel, Neil Saffer and our newest Rotarian Gerry Purdy

If you would like to help with the website or any other digital media please reach out to Bob or Bill. The next website committee meeting date will be announced in an upcoming meeting.