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A number of clubs already on-line seem to be stuck in a corner of a site belonging to somebody else - a member's firm, a friend's site, whatever. They have a web address that may be very long to type in and/or bear no clues that it's anything to do with a locality or Lionism, such as "http://freewind.legend.co.uk/~abje1/shipley.html" or "http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Bluffs/1716/"
And changing the site content may involve the delay and hassle of going through a middle-man instead of a couple of minutes at your own computer.
If your own ISP includes free webspace you can disguise the address in a couple of ways. The ISP may allow you to use an "alias" so typing www.mexbro.dsl.pipex.com is converted by Pipex to the address of the space they've allocated to me, actually www.ascx08.dsl.pipex.com.
A better way is to register a domain (the name you pick) with somebody like Easily or Free Parking who will automatically re-direct browsers to your free site with the less snappy name, and give you an e-mail address such as Secretary@anytown-lions.co.uk. Prices start at around £5 per year, and it's yours for life (providing you keep up on the rent) even if you change ISP, so can be used on letterheads and publicity materials without fear of it becoming out-of-date.
For an example, Mexborough Lions have registered 'mexboro.org.uk' as our domain name. Type 'www.mexboro.org.uk' into your browser, and you'll be invisibly re-routed to our site on the free webspace included with my ISP's package. Send an e-mail to and again it's forwarded to my own email address, or any other member's address I've specified. For just £5 a year.
Next stage up is to pay for hosting. Then you're not relying on one member to donate room on his free site, and any member with the password can look after the site. If that member leaves or wants a change, someone else can take over without too much trouble. There are several other advantages once you've learned a bit about the programming side, and statistics are generally available about how many visitors you've had, where your visitors are from, and which pages they visited. Hosts like 34SP.com charge a modest £18 per year, and will also handle the registration and upkeep of your chosen domain name.
Read the small print carefully. Check what's included in the price – you need name (domain) registration, web forwarding to your own ISP (if you don't pay for hosting) and e-mail forwarding – and what will you pay to renew? Will you have to carry adverts? Is the service fast and reliable? You can find user comments on some newsgroups and forums.