Easy Way to Create a Website for Your HEMA Group

Hello everyone,

Because a lot of groups in HEMA don’t have a website or internet presence I wanted to supply a way for those people to setup a website for little to no cost easily.

Google Brings this all together

 

I don’t want to spend too much time touting google but the reality is the services they supply brings this all together for free. Web hosting, calendars, emails, voice, video, and more...

Create a New Google Account

 

First thing you want to do is create a google account you want to associate with your hema club. You can use the standard google account settings or setup a https://gsuite.google.com/ for custom email domain and more features. I have gsuite setup for some other things in my life and it works really well but for IndyWestHEMA I just went with a standard gmail account for right now as it works perfectly fine for my purposes. If you need to have multiple people you need setup with emails pointed to the your sites domain you might be better with a gquite setup.

If you set up a gquite you will probably first want to get a domain, you can google this or jump down where I briefly look at this in the section header below named “Domain”

Hosting

 

Blogspot.com is your answer here. I have used this resource to setup websites for everything from tech blogs, to charities, to IndyWestHEMA . With just a little knowledge this can go a long way at free hosting and all you need is a google account.
To get started go to your gmail account and in the upper right corner click on the dots and choose more… then Blogger. From here you will want to click on , label it and follow the prompts. Congrats you have your blog setup now that easy, but you might want more than just a simple blog.

Domain

 

To obtain a domain you can use the google suggested domain or one of the many sites such as domain.com .

If you go to then you will see the option under Publishing to both or/and to . I will not go into any detail on this section because there are too many variables on possible options you can choose and depending on the domain provider you decide to use it may look vastly different, if you need help here I suggest going to Googles Help Resource Here .

Calendar

 

Again this is a simple thing within google. Just open up the Calendar page within the google account you have setup for your HEMA group. On the left side where you see the dropdown arrow and choose .

One the calendar is creation make sure you check to “Make this calendar public” if you want to post it on the website.

Once you have finished this you can now share this calendar with the people you want to be able to control it and/or post it on the blog

• Sharing your calendar with people

This is as simple as clicking the dropdown on the calendar and clicking Share this Calendar. It should be fairly intuitive how to this works.

• Embed the calendar in the website

There are a few ways this can be done but I will post how I did it and I am sure you can figure it out from here.

First create the page you want to post it on in blogger, go into the blog settings and choose then click on in the top left make sure to choose HTML

Put this aside for a moment while we get the share location for the calendar. This requires that you set the calendar to public for everyone to see it.


Next go to “Calendar settings”

The look for the section that is titled “Embed This Calendar”

Copy everything in the text box and paste it into the blog page then click , it should now show up on the page when you visit it.

From here

 

From here you can add more pages, use the blog to post information, remove the blog and make it a website front without a blog.

Some more useful services we use that are free

• https://drive.google.com/drive/my-drive : to share documents between each other.
• https://www.google.com/voice/ : to setup a phone number to use and I can set a custom voicemail and hours it is available
• https://www.facebook.com/groups/ : A location to have internal conversations
• https://www.google.com/maps : to embed a location on the map and share it for meepup locations or your clubs store front.

I can name many many more such as twitter, discord, handouts for example that are useful but I have to stop someplace and I will stop here. I hope the ones I listed here serve you well.

Conclusion

 

I know this is an overly simple post for anyone that already knows about it but for those that don’t it may provide you a way to setup a web presence for your HEMA club/school/group etc…

Enjoy :)