Your club website can be like an old limp flag, carrying the Club logo, a Club theme, some "selfie" photos of a president handing over a cheque, a posed picture of some people exchanging a certificate and a few words of self-congratulation.

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Your club website can - and should - be the most powerful enabler of most things your club aspires to achieve, working hard on making your club succeed in many different important ways.

Here are the key characteristics of an effective website, when driven by club-wide marketing, membership and management strategies.

Your website is the engine room of just about everything your club wants to achieve - grow membership, reach supporters, deliver value to your sponsors, manage events, raise funds, increase event attendances, engage with your community, promote your club generally.

Your website is the primary communications service through which you reach beyond the confines of your own members to potential new members, sponsors, supporters, volunteers and interested parties through website content, social media and newsletters.

Your website is the primary meeting place through which your members can start relationships with non-members, as well as with organisations with whom you share your Organisation's values.  After all, the only way you'll ever find new members is through getting known by non-members.

Your website is the channel for acquiring contacts in your contact database, the marketing lifeblood for potential members, volunteers, supporters and event attendees.

Your website is the primary showcase of everything you do, everything you say and everything you stand for.

Your website is the main operations and administration centre for your club - member management, meeting management, financial reconciliation, attendances, event management, bulletins, newsletters and so on.

Your website is the central document archive for your club, avoiding the incidence of lost documents or documentation spread over individual members' computers.

Your website is the training platform for your Organisation's procedures and protocols, committee operations and the like, avoiding the wasteful need to re-invent the wheel every year.

Your website contributes to club governance, helping avoid corporate risk with respect to retention of records, communications and other statutory obligations.

Your website is the primary way of getting discovered when strangers use Google looking for something other than Organisation or your Club in particular