I'm Philip from the Minnesota Orienteering Club (MNOC). I just went through the exercise of revamping our club’s website about 6 months ago (
www.mnoc.org), so I’d like to share some of my experiences.
First off, I knew there were a couple of main features I wanted in our new site:
-- Flexibility in design
-- Optimized for mobile/smart-phones
-- Needed an easy/clean way to display 20+ events/year
-- Needed an easy way to display results and import them from our OR timing software
-- Needed to handle payment processing (for events, memberships, maps, merchandise, etc)
-- Bonus if it managed memberships
-- And most important, the back-end needed to be easy enough to use so that our primary contributors (race directors, timing manager, marketing manager) could easily go in and make updates themselves.
So I started off my journey by researching and doing free-trials with all the popular CMS's (Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, Wix, Weebly, Squarespace), along with a two 'membership' systems (WildApricot, NEON). All had their pros/cons, but in the end, Wix was the obvious choice for us. Unlike other CMS's which require web development expertise in order to customize the design, Wix has an outstanding drag-n-drop system that gives you complete flexibility on how you want your website to look. I'd highly recommend it. And for anyone interested, it also has a one-click "site copy" feature, so if any other orienteering clubs wanted to start off with our template, I’d gladly create a copy for anyone interested.
Our payment processing and membership had to be done outside of Wix, though. WildApricot had a really nice system, but they didn't have the flexibility to create the website how we wanted it. So in the end, we went with a local company (ZapEvent). EventBrite also had a decent setup, and of course Active.com is one of the larger players in that space. EventReg was also an option, but at the time, they weren't setup to handle 'local' meets well. Hopefully we can use them in the future though [as their pricing was the best].