HOW TO MANAGE YOUR DIRECTORY WEBSITE

Welcome! In this tutorial, you will learn how to manage all necessary aspects of your city directory website. After doing this complete tutorial, at your own pace, if you have any additional questions, either email or call us to receive further help or instructions.

If after you have completed your online guide and you still have questions, please refer to our FAQ section to see if the answer is there before contacting us.

To begin, one of the first things you need to know is the email attachment that was sent to you contains all the necessary links, and login information you need to access all areas of your directory, as well as our exclusive Member's Area. Please refer to this page when needing to access either the Directory Admin Panel, the Forum Admin Panel, or the CPanel of your site. Below you will find a small summary of what each of the sections mentioned above are for.

 Directory Admin Panel: this is where you will manage all directory related informations including, adding new categories for the directory, classifieds, or coupons sections, managing listings for all these sections, editing your homepage, classifieds, coupons and advertising left and right boxes, changing your prices for your standard or premium packages, changing your Paypal email address, adding the online payment processor 2Checkout to your account, changing your template theme, emailing all businesses listed in your directory, uploading a banner to a company listing or editing a listing (including deleting a listing), accessing basic html help, approving listings and laying out your advertising options for your Advertise page.

Forum Admin Panel: This is where you will manage all aspects of your Forum Area. This includes a separate banner rotator, a newsletter option that can be sent to all registered Forum members, a recommend this site option, polls, articles ( great for movie, events, restaurant reviews), message board, additional left and right boxes for you to create and customize, private messages, downloads, links and an FAQ section. This is an area of your site where your visitors can actively become a part of your directory by submitting articles, contributing to the message boards and participating in any polls you create.

CPanel: This is your hosting account manager. All files that control your scripts and images are managed here using the File Manager. Please only access this portion of your directory if you are absolutely comfortable using it and have a working knowledge of PHP or HTML (We may not support any PHP files that have been edited by someone other than our staff). Through the CPanel, you can also create new email accounts for your directory and make backups of your site. We encourage you to do this as often as you can. Even though we make automatic backups of your site, in some events that our backups are used to restore your site, you may loose up to two weeks of information. But if you are in the habit of creating backup often, you lose could be much less in the event of a serious error. This tutorial will help you learn how to create these backups.

OK! Ready to begin learning how to do all of this? Let's get started!

We will begin with how to manage the Directory portion of your site. First things you will wish to know are how to create new categories and subcategories. The following walkthrough will show you how to do this:

http://www.cityamerica.com/walkthroughs/dircategories/
Depending on what directory version you are running, the images pictured in the above walkthrough may differ slightly (color and small cosmetic differences) from your actual admin panel.

Things you need to know when creating new categories and subcategories:

All categories must contain subcategories in order for a business to be able to list in it.

All categories and subcategories in the Admin Panel are displayed in the order they are created. However, all categories and subcategories that visitors and advertisers see are always displayed alphabetically.

Next aspect of running your directory is learning how to register new businesses. This process is the same for either visitors to your site, or for you, as the admin, wishing to add a new business to the directory. For a step-by-step walkthrough, please visit the below link.

http://www.cityamerica.com/walkthroughs/register/

Tip: Businesses can register in up to three categories of their choice. However, you can specify on your advertising page that Free or Standard listings are only allowed one category, but that Premium advertiser's can be given the option to list in up to three appropriate categories. This could be one more little perk toward up selling and advertiser from standard to premium. But keep in mind, that you will need to police this as the administrator, because the script will allow them to select more than one category, even as a standard listing. 

After a business has been registered to the directory, an email will be sent to you, as the administrator letting you know you need to approve it. Below is a walkthrough showing you how to approve these awaiting listings:

http://www.cityamerica.com/walkthroughs/dirapprovals/

After a business is approved, it will automatically display in the directory. If the business was entered as a premium advertiser, they are now given the option to upload a banner image to your directory banner rotator. You can either do this through the Admin Panel's Company Manager, or the business owner can do it, by logging into their account using the top right box of your homepage and editing their listing. 

Setting Pricelists

Pricelists give businesses a place to share with your visitors a little information about specific products or services that they offer. To set pricelists, you will need to login to your admin panel and use the companies manager. Then navigate to the business you wish to allow pricelists and edit their listing info. There will be an option to set how many items you are going to allow them (Set price lines:). Once you enable it, by telling it how many items you will allow them, the pricelists option be be available for the business to utilize.

The reason for having you set limits in the admin panel are because every directory owner want to utilize this feature so differently. Some want it as an additional revenue source, some only want pricelists for premium advertisers, some want to charge per item offered. Also each item does use up some of your disc space allotted for your hosting plan. So, you do not want to allow a business an unlimited number of items, unless you are being compensated.

Customizing Your Directory

Our scripts are written to easily allow you to customize certain areas of your site. These areas are: any of the left and right boxes on your homepage, and in your classifieds, coupons and advertise section, the center box on your advertise page and the area below all the categories listed in the directory, classifieds and coupons sections. These areas are edited through the Directory Admin Panel. See below:

http://www.cityamerica.com/walkthroughs/cells_admin/

Note: Adding new pages, editing and adding text or images to any other areas of your site are considered "cosmetic customizations". These are are covered in your monthly lease and if any support is needed for these, outside of what is covered in this tutorial is subject to an hourly customization fee. Please contact us for any customizations to receive an estimate, or request changes. Customization payments may be required to be submitted in advance. If you wish to pursue making these changes yourself, we suggest you be absolutely comfortable with your knowledge of html. Our sites do offer plenty of customizable areas and are very user friendly. Additional pages and customized areas are nice, but not necessary to running a successful directory.

Changing Your Directory Settings

In this area, you will learn where to go to change certain settings of your site, such as pricing, your paypal email, ect. Click the below link to learn where to change the prices of your Standard and Premium packages and also changing your PayPal email address:

http://www.cityamerica.com/walkthroughs/dirsettings/

Note: To remove PayPal as an automatic payment processor when registering a business, leave the PayPal email field blank. If you wish to offer other services in addition to Standard and Premium advertising, such as Paid Classifieds, or charge for Spotlight advertising on your Homepage or any other areas of your site, you will need to use your Advertising Page to layout what services you wish to offer and let your advertiser's know how they can make payment to you. You may wish to secure a PO Box address for mail-in payments and give that address on your advertising page. 

If you wish to add 2checkout as an automatic payment processor, please visit the below walkthrough:

http://www.cityamerica.com/walkthroughs/2checkout 

These automatic payment processors allow businesses to make payments online right after they register their business listing. When using this options, they are subscribed to automatic re-occurring Monthly Billing that will charge them whatever price is set in your Admin Panel Settings. This occurs without you needing to send invoices. If a payment fails, you will receive email notice from either outside Processor (Paypal or 2checkout). Also, you will receive an email notice from either Payment Processor if the client cancels the subscription. Then you can contact them to learn f it was accidental or intentional, and take appropriate action.

Any additional services you offer will be your responsibility to invoice and collect payments. Paypal makes it easy to learn how to accept payments for services offered online. Please visit their site and login to your PayPal account to learn how you can accept other payments.

Changing Your Directory Theme

The settings area is also where you can go to change your template theme. Additional themes can be purchased and installed, if you wish to easily change the entire look of your site instantly. We offer many styles that are seasonal and holiday themed, so you may dress up your site for the holidays. To do this, you can login to your directory admin panel and click the Settings link. Scroll all the way to the bottom. Above the submit button, you will see the field where you can use the dropdown bar to change between themes. If you have more than one theme listed, you can change between them instantly by selecting a new theme, and clicking the submit button. 

Setting a Business of the Week (BOW)

This can be a valuable perk for businesses adverting in your directory. You can easily set and change the business of the week through the Directory Admin Panel by following the below walkthrough:

http://www.cityamerica.com/walkthroughs/dirbow 

Note: To remove Business of the Week and offer NO business of the week, follow the steps in the above walkthrough and use the dropdown bar to select Not business of the week. To change from one business to another, there is no need to login to the current company that is currently BOW, just go to the company manager and select the listing of the company you wish to change BOW to. Then update their listing as in the above walkthrough. PLEASE NOTE: A business must have either a logo or banner uploaded to be displayed as business of the week.

Classifieds Section

To help you better understand your classifieds section, please read the below:

Classified ads are added from the classifieds page of your site. Anyone wishing to place an ad must first register. Then they will be able to add as many classifieds as they wish. Classified ads will be limited to 250 characters in the ad description. Classified ads are held for administration approval, just like businesses. Advertisers are given the ability to upload an image of the item offered. Classified ads do not expire. They remain listed until either the advertiser or administrator deletes them.  When a new ad has been submitted, you will receive and email letting you know it is time to review the ad for approval. To approve a new classified ad, you will need to login to your Directory Admin Panel and click the classifieds admin link. then click unreviewed ads. The process is very much the same as approving a business listing from here.

You can also edit or delete an ad by clicking the ads manager link.

Coupons Section

To help you better understand your coupons section, please read the below:

If your directory was installed after June 23rd, your advertisers are given the option to also add a coupon to the coupons section. They will be help for administration approval, which can be done through the Directory Admin Panel by clicking on the coupons admin link. If you wish to offer coupons as either a paid or free service to anyone who is not a current advertiser, you will need to add the coupon for them from your Coupon Admin page by clicking "Add Coupon".

Note: If you do wish to make coupons a paid service, then it is up to you to invoice and collect payments. You can offer them as a perk for Premium advertisers, or you can allow any advertiser to add a coupon. We recommend keeping coupons free for a while to help build up your coupon library. Once you have a comfortable number of coupons, you can change this to a paid service.

Coupons do allow for a logo or image to be uploaded.

To approve a coupon submitted by a business:

Login to your admin panel.
Click "coupons admin."
Click "coupons manager".
Click "Show unreviewed ads".
Click the edit link at the far right of the new coupon.
Use the Approved drop down bar to select Yes or No.
Click Save.

This concludes the Directory Tutorial. To continue onto the Forum Tutorial, please click the below link:

http://cityamerica.com/forum.htm