Our old site was moribund, the news page was around 18 months old. We moved it to a new platform. Drupal as it happens, but trying to avoid being patronising, it's not the easiest to start with.
Many rebuilds start with the best intentions. The difficult bit (for people with IT background) is not the set up, it's keeping it up to date. We try to update the "news" on the front page every 2-4 weeks. There's an event diary that we try to update as the schedule changes. If you can keep that up, then it should becomes the noticeboard of the association. If you can't update regularly, old news is not what you want on the front page. A "welcome" page with what-we-do and where-we-are is a better option, aim to at least update the contacts as they change and post the annual schedule of meetings.
Try not to start from the point of what you want as an individual, or even what the committee have seen elsewhere. As an example of overdoing it, we tried a forum. It wasn't used enough to be worth visiting regularly and even though protected with captcha it was soon attracting loads of spam posts, fake handbags and the like. So it became signed in members only, and hasn't been used since. I should remove it from the menus really. Consider it from the average member's point of view if you're trying to establish it as the regular news channel. Or prospective new members if it's basically a directory entry stating what you do.
