Racing Website

Racing Website
By Don Terrill (c)2005

Every team needs it's own website.

Benefits:

• More professional looking team - There's no question you'll be viewed better by sponsors if you have a team website. And, with the today's ease of set up, there's no excuse. Read on for options - some having little or no cost.
  
• Another way to promote current sponsors - You can create a links page with all your sponsors or a page for each sponsor. You can also get more creative and do things like show their product in action on your site.
  
• Increased value of offer to prospective sponsors - Just one more thing to add to your sponsorship proposal. Show them what you've done for current sponsors - maybe a picture of the site or a testimonial from a satisfied sponsor. Show them what they'll be getting.
  
• Simple way to keep sponsors up to date - Just post your weekly results, along with a write-up, to your site; and then just email the link on Monday to all your sponsors and prospects.
  

How to get your own site:

• Register a domain name - My favorite place is namecheap.com - Affordable and has some nice features that other domain companies don't have. You'll want to register yourteam.com and/or yourdriver.com - most teams will be best centered around a driver - that's what fans remember.
  
• Set up hosting - Now that you have your own domain name, you need a place to host it. Hurricane Electric doesn't have a fancy site, but I love the service - we've been with them for years.
  
• Design site - You can do it yourself, buy a ready made template or pay someone to design a custom site for you. It all depends on how much time and money you have to spend.
  
• Upload to server - It might be built into your design software or you may need to get a stand-alone FTP application - you can find them for free at version tracker.
  

Budget/Beginner Site:

• Free RacingTeams.com Site - We include a free one page site with the purchase of our Sponsorship Gold package. It's hosted at racingteams.com - which will make your website address: www.racingteams.com/yourteam
  
• Free Geocites Site - Now owned by yahoo, this is probably the biggest free hosting service on the web. You won't end up with a nice name, buy hey, it's free.
  
• Free Domain forwarding - Really want a cool yourteam.com address, but don't want to pay big bucks? Register your domain name at namecheap.com - they have a cool feature that will allow you to forward it to a free hosting service like the two mentioned above.
• Free Site Management - Blogger is known for blogs, but what most people don't know is how you can use it for any kind of website - it will allow you to upload photos and even take care of site archiving.

Here's what I would do if I was just starting out:

• Register a domain name at namecheap.com
• Set up a site at blogger.com
• Set the forwarding option at namecheap.com to point to your blogger.com site.
• Login to your blogger account and start posting away.

Cost for the above setup? $8.88 per year - yep, per year. Can't beat that.