Richmond Amateur Radio Club of Richmond, VA. USA, known locally as RARC-W4ZA.
RARC is celebrating
100 Years as an
ARRL Affiliated Club!
The ARRL provides advocacy with the FCC and Congress to protect our frequencies.
QST/Over-The-Air Magazine
Publications/Education!
Networking!
The purpose of RARC website, as it is with all effective informational campaigns, is to reinforce and build on the messaging in our other outreach including newsletters, brochures, and social media.
The RARC website is designed to:
Provide easy and intuitive navigation to inform and welcome web site visitor. The interactive web site platform allows us to create a much deeper experience for the visitor, so we add new goals to:
- Capture attention and engage
- Enroll in license-prep classes and testing
- Make it easy to get on the air
- Easy for non-computer folk to update website content by using the WordPress content management system
Quickly capture the visitor’s interest: We know website visitors are interested in some aspect of ham radio or they won’t be on the site, but we don’t know exactly what brought them, so the site immediately immerses the visitor in a moving photo-collage of various aspects of amateur radio, including ARRL Field Day, MakerFests, Public Service, balloon chasing, ISS contacts, morse code and satellite contacts. This presents a broad view of the opportunities of amateur radio.
On the home page, in easy view, are hyperlinks for getting licensed, finding repeaters and nets, borrowing equipment, the RARC YouTube channel joining RARC, finding past newsletters and an abundance of link to other interests. If they didn’t find what they wanted, there’s search bar in the top right corner. If the visitor needs more information, contact links are on the home page and access to board members is on the Officers page.
As the home of the RARC Radio Amateur Radio Teaching School, the web site invites enrolling in a Spring or Fall ham test-prep classes for Technician, General or Amateur Extra. From the “Get Licensed” header on the home page, there is a logical and intuitive path of hyperlinks to learning about what classes are offered, to class schedules, to registration, right to when testing will be offered.
The link to the calendar takes visitors to opportunities to engage with hams in area nets for rag chew, ARES and a special new net sponsored by RARC for New Hams where there no dumb questions and a totally criticism-free zone and new hams are taking roles as Net Control.
Webmaster, Ken Leidner, created a .kmz data file that integrates with Google Earth. The result is an interactive, graphical view of where all their member friends and repeaters are. The link to download the experience is on the “Latest News” tab.
The RARC website ranks #1 in organic search results for “ham radio Richmond, VA” for searches in the metro Richmond, VA area. We view this as an excellent indication that our web site design is not only meeting the criteria that search engines use to rank websites, but that our site contains the content and navigational ease that prospective and existing hams are searching for.