We started by asking: What's the core purpose of a club's online presence? While attracting new members is valuable, we questioned if it justified the extensive effort often put into maintaining a public website. Our approach is different. We see lovebowls as a dynamic portal designed primarily to enhance the experience of your existing members. Rather than relying solely on social media for internal communication, imagine a dedicated space where members can: Log in to indicate their availability for upcoming matches Receive personalised match notifications via email Make and view match selections online Access detailed playing statistics While we offer standard pages like Contact, News, and About Us, lovebowls goes beyond. We introduce innovative features that foster engagement within your club community. This portal can seamlessly complement your existing public-facing website, focusing on internal operations and member interactions. It's not an instant transformation, but we believe lovebowls offers a progressive path to streamline your club's internal processes and boost member engagement. It's about making your club more efficient and connected, all while keeping your members' experience at the forefront. Remember, lovebowls can work alongside your current website (if you have one), enhancing rather than replacing your online presence. It's about adding value to your existing members' experience, not competing with your public-facing site.

Yes. You can create a site with us completely without cost and without providing any payment information. You may add as much content to your site as you like. You can use all of the features and publish your site so that an unlimited number of visitors from around the world can access it. There are no time limits to this either and we promise never to introduce any. We do however limit your free site to 25 active members, that is to say a maximum of 25 people can create an account on lovebowls and apply to join your site. Membership provides additional benefits when browsing your site such as being able to get to certain screens that visitors cannot access. You (or others you make site admins) can decide who is granted membership access. For many clubs however, even though they have more than 25 bowlers they do not expect that many to sign up to their website (at least initially). We are happy to support bowls clubs and help introduce a potentially new way of managing their activities. If at some stage in the future your club reaches the 25 website member limit then we hope that you will find such a website worth paying a relatively small subscription. We also limit the number of emails you can send to your members through the message centre on your free site to 250 per month. To offset the cost of a premium site or even make money from your free site, you can sell advertising on your Home page and we also offer a referral program that may offer even more benefits. Read more about our Pricing.

You can read about this here.

First, you must create an account on lovebowls and sign in. Then go to the club's homepage either by clicking the link in an invite email or from the Club Directory. If you have been invited your account will automatically be created otherwise you will be able to request membership from the pop-up that appears.

Yes, you can join any number of clubs for example an indoor and an outdoor club. You can switch clubs by clicking the blue "lovebowls" link shown at the bottom of each page and then clicking the "Clubs" menu.

Yes, however if you intend on using the match selection feature there is a limit of 6 rinks per fixture.

Your quota of monthly emails depends on which plan you are on. With the free plan you can SEND 250 emails from your website every month. Replies sent to web site visitors (i.e. non-members) who get in touch with you through your "Contact" page do not count towards your quota. Only messages sent to members from your Message Centre of from the Selection menu of the fixture teamsheet will count towards your quota.

Please bear the following in mind If you decide that you wish to upgrade from the free plan to a paid plan. The subscription can only be purchased by the member who originally created the club site "The Owner". If the owner of the site is unable to complete the purchase for whatever reason please contact us and we can change the ownership of your site. Once logged in as the club owner go to your site's Administration page and click the upgrade button to begin the process of purchasing a subscription. Subscriptions take effect on your website immediately the purchase is confirmed. If your club is unable to purchase online we are happy to process your order offline via bank transfer or cheque. Please contact us to find out more.

You first join our community by creating an account. Then you can go to the "My Site" page which guides you through the process of requesting your site. Personal Sites are auto-approved and are available almost immediately, club sites must be manually approved and may take a little longer.

We do offer a premium (paid) service called the Club Online Bundle which includes 5 hours of one-on-one guidance and support, time that can be used to help create and setup your new site including moving data from old sites. On a free site - lovebowls is made to be easy to setup and use. We're happy to help on our forums or via direct contact with any issues or questions you may have, but we do not provide bespoke website design or transfer of data as this is too expensive for the majority of clubs. What we have done with lovebowls is design a DIY platform upon which bowls clubs themselves can build and maintain their own websites. lovebowls is able to offer free websites to clubs because those sites are not bespoke designed sites with all their cost overheads, instead clubs are given a framework that contains everything they will need to design and run their website themselves.

Everyone who becomes a member of lovebowls community by creating their free account is entitled to create a personal site. A personal site is a place that behaves almost exactly like a full Club website. You can switch to your personal site at any time and you might consider doing so for any of the following reasons. 1 ) To try out a feature that you are considering using on your main club site 2 ) To evaluate lovebowls without involving any club names, emails etc. 3 ) To create a custom page and see how it behaves before replicating it to your club site.

The following occurs once you have completed the application and your site has been approved. Your site will be created in an unpublished, draft state meaning it will not be visible to anbody but you (the owner). Any existing websites you already have running for you club are completely separate and these continue as normal. You are free to check out your new site's features, start to enter some data and get a feel for things. You can invite others from your club to join you in evaluating your draft site from the Admin->Members area. If at any point you decide you do not want your lovebowls website you can simply stop using it and walk away. We reserve the right to remove unpublished sites after a certain amount of time has elapsed since they were last active.

Publishing a site is an action that is performed once you have created and setup your site and you are happy for the world to see it. You can publish your site at any time from the Club->Administration area. When a site is published: 1. Your site is added to the lovebowls Club Directory. 2. Anybody on the internet can access your club's public pages. 3. Your site becomes part of the lovebowls sitemap and will, in time, be identified by search engines such as Google.

Yes, your site will appear with your club name and a description underneath that you can set when it is published. In addition you are able to define the keywords that search engines use to help your site appear based on the terms that people search for. Once you publish your site it may take anything from a few days to a few weeks for your site to be found and indexed by search engines.

Once you have created your site you can review all of the settings using your site's Adminstration area. This set of pages allows you to control all aspects of yours site's content and appearance.

Yes, of course. As well as the stardard pages that require no effort to create you are able to create an unlimited number of custom pages containing content such a documents, images and videos. You can even embed other sites such as a rink booking system within your main lovebowls web site (as long as the other site supports this).

You can create "Custom" pages on your site but there are some limitations as to what they can contain. You can't put raw HTML on them for example. However, you can do lots of other things with them. 1. If you have an existing web page hosted on another site (as long as it is HTTPS - the secure type of page) then you can "embed" that page in your site 2. You can copy/paste your webpage into a Google Document including images, links and formating and then embed that in your site. The advantage of doing this is that you can share the document with others and edits update to your site automatically.

Yes, you can achieve this by hiding the relevant menu option.

Members are added in one of two ways. By Invitation If you have a list of member email addresses you can bulk invite to join your site from the Admin Members Invites screen. You can do this even for a site that is still in draft. People invited in this way will receive an email with full instructions on how to connect, signup and login to your site. If you invite a member and they report not recieving any email then please ensure you ask your members to check their spam/junk email folders and mark the admin@lovebowls.co.uk address as safe. 2. By Request Once a site is published, any person with a lovebowls account can visit your site and request membership. You will receive an email when this happens asking you to access your Admin Members Requests page to verify. Take care to ensure that every request you approve is a valid member.

Removing members is useful if a person is no longer part of your club and you need to prevent them from logging into your site. Remove members by selecting them in the Admin Members area and unticking the "Member" box. You are warned that when removing a member: The person will no longer have access to members only site content such as contact details of other members or other items that you have specified as "Members Only". All offices, availability, selection, stats and holiday dates for the member will be removed permanently - this will have to be re-entered if at a later date you reinstate the member. Their club member profile page will be removed. All competition wins and honours board entries for the member will be replaced with the members generic name eg. "J.Smith" instead of a link to their profile.

Yes, you can let a subscription expire and your site will automatically revert to the free plan. Any members over the limit of the free plan will be removed from your site in order of last login date (oldest first) and be unable to login. Any honours and selection information for these removed members will be replaced with their plain, text name eg. "John Smith".

Please let us know by describing your issue on our forums. We will try to help sort the issue out as quickly as we can.

Absolutely, member data is stored encrypted and all our pages are served over HTTPS using SSL Certificates. ISO 27001 & 27018 Certificates. We maintain industry best practices for handling personal information (PII) and managing website security risks.

Yes, we can provide the site owner with data from the following areas in Excel spreadsheet format on request: Member information Competitions, Fixtures and Events Club Honours Life Members News Offices Club trophies We are unable to provide the following information Availability Selection Member Holidays/unavailable dates Player Stats Message History

Each lovebowls community member can create and own a single club website. To create another site create another login. Each member is however permitted to create a "Personal Site" which is separate from any Club Site they have created.

You'll need to log in to your domain registrar's website (the company where you purchased your domain) and update the domain's settings to point to your lovebowls website URL. This is typically done through the domain's DNS (Domain Name System) settings. If you're unsure how to do this, your domain registrar should be able to provide you with step-by-step instructions. Alternatively, you can also consider using a third-party URL forwarding service, such as Cloudflare or Namecheap, to redirect your domain to your lovebowls website. These services often provide additional features like SSL/HTTPS support and custom URL masking, which can further enhance your club's online presence. If you have any trouble setting up the domain redirection, feel free to reach out to me or the lovebowls support team, and we'll be happy to assist you further.

You might notice that when using your site the address that appears in your browser will look something like this: Note that there is nothing in the link above that specifies a club. This is because lovebowls stores the club that you last visited in a hidden area called the browser cache. In effect all clubs using the lovebowls platform will use the same address when they each go to their own homepage - and they will all see something different depending on the club stored in the cache. Sharing the link therefore relies on a value being in the cache to display the correct information. If no value exists in the cache then lovebowls does not know which page to display and will route the visitor to the "Club Directory" where they can click on the club they require. To prevent this happening you should use the link button displayed on the header bar of every page if you need to share a link: This button generates a link and copies it to your computers clipboard ready for you to share that is suitable to be used by anybody (including visitors who've never visited your site).