Ever wonder it you should create a homepage for your club? Ever wonder if it would be of any use to your club? Of course other gamers from Australia or Mexico could see your site, but who cares it it doesn't help your club recruit new guys from you hometown, right?

During the fall of 1995, I wrote my first homepage on the world wide web. Shortly after that, I put up a homepage for our Central Indiana miniatures wargaming club, Kampfgruppe. I could have almost forgotten about it for most of '96 through '98, except that a curious thing happened starting about last year. We've actually had new gamers come to our games because they saw the homepagel For a small group of gamers (whose numbers for a time seemed to dwindle as we got married, started families, or moved away), it has been exciting getting new members in our local area involved with us.

While I have had fun trading wargaming experiences via e-mail with gamers in Australia and Mexico who saw our site, the real value for having it is getting more guys involved locally. Our web site, http://www.cs.iupui.edu/~ateal/Wargames/, has lately been generating an e-mail inquiry every other week or so from gamers in our Central Indiana area who are interested in historical miniatures. Some actually do come to our games. Over the last 12 months, we've had five new gamers attend our events who met us through our Kampfgruppe website. And they keep coming, too! Our new gaming friends now account for 1/3 to 1/2 of our game attendees. All the new guys are buying and painting lead, and one of our newest members actually came with me to Historicon this summer.

If you're thinking about establishing a website for your club, here are a few thoughts I'd like to pass on from my webmastering experience for Kamptgruppe regarding success factors for making your webpage a recruiting tool for new members.

1. Make sure people can find your webpage.

After your site is up, submit your link to the major search engines (Lycos, Yahoo, etc.) and other wargaming clubs to link to your site. It your site has been up for awhile, type in a search like "wargaming and Your city name" in Yahoo, and see if someone can actually find your club. Also ask HMGS Great Lakes to link you into their website. The Wargame Opponent Finder, http://tetrad.stanford.edu/Players.html, is another place to submit a link to your site.

2. Update your site regularly.

Keep adding battle reports, photos, and most importantly, keep the events calendar full with future events. If it looks like people are actively gaming, it's more likely that others will want to be involved with your group and contact you.

3. Keep It Simple

omplex webpage whistles and bells (e.g., moving G IF logos, frames, and javascript) do not work in everyone's web browsers. Also, if your HTML is too complex, it will be harder for you to maintain, and thus your updates will be less frequent. A frequently updated site will attract more interest than fancy complicated webpage design.

4. And if you're now to web authoring, don't be intimidated into thInking only computer wizards can produce a webpage.

Basic HTML (hyper-text markup language, the "language" used to write webpages) is not hard to learn. And once you get into it, it's really kind of fun. If any of you have resolved artillery fire in Johnny Reb or a cavalry charge in Empire, you've done a lot more complicated things in life than write webpages in HTML.

With the tremendous growth of world wide web usage and the ease of advertising on it these days, it has become so much easier now to reach out and contact otherwise isolated, potential wargamers. If you don't have a webpage for your club yet, you are overlooking a tremendous tool to promote the hobby in your local area and boost attendance to your games. In our opinion, our website has been a highly effective means forus to find more kriegspielers and it continues to bring us results. I encourage all of you to do the same and use the web to advertise your clubs. Good luck!