Transcript
Jay: My name is Jay Moonah, I am the noisy Apricot, I am in charge of marketing here at Wild Apricot. And for but bulk of the presentation I’m going to throw it over to one of our great support team, Matthieu. Matthieu’s going to take it away and do the bulk of the presentation and, as I mentioned, we’ll hold our questions to the end. So Matthieu, take it away.
Matt: All right. Thanks, Jay. So as Jay mentioned, my name is Matthieu and I am the poetic Apricot here at Wild Apricot. So we’ll get started with this presentation. This presentation’s going to be about setting up your Wild Apricot website and before we dive into actually going in and editing the pages, let’s just back track a bit and take a look at what Apricot is and how it works.
Now you may already be familiar with traditional web-hosting services or non-hosted solutions. In those scenarios you would basically install from software onto your computer, so for example FrontPage, Dreamweaver, iWeb, something like that, and then you would build your web pages on your computer and then upload it to your server to display it to the Internet. And then if you needed to make any changes, you need to download the file again, edit it and then re-upload it. With these non-hosted solutions you also have to take care of your own backup, virus scanning and other security things that go along with your website.
Now the tip is, or what Apricot’s got is, that we’re a hosted solution so everything runs directly off our server. So you would do everything you need to do directly through your web browser, whether it’s Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. So there’s nothing to download, nothing to install, everything happens directly in the browser. Whether you’re using a Windows computer or a Mac computer, it doesn’t matter; your changes are done automatically and published live right away; so nothing to download, nothing to program, nothing to code.
Editing the web pages is also very easy with our software because you don’t need to do any coding or any programming. You can have absolutely no experience with designing websites and you can easily make websites through our solution.
Now let’s just take a look at how the web pages are formed with Wild Apricot. So with Wild Apricot you’ll have your header, your footer, your menu and your main content area. So generally you will use the same header and footer on all your pages, so basically you would just set that up once and then you don’t have to worry about that again. The menu is generated automatically by whatever pages you add to your website. So you don’t have to worry about the menu, that’s automatically taken care of for you.
So the only thing that you need to worry about is the main content area. This is where you would add your text, your pictures, tables, everything would go into there. And editing this section, as you’ll see, is as simple as just adding your content to it, similar to if you’re making a Word document or PowerPoint; so there’s, again, no code to put in, anything like that.
So you already have the page already laid out the way it is. It will either look like this example here or it may look a little different, depending on which theme you choose. Now we have a lot of themes to choose from, a lot of different colour styles to pick for your website and we’ll take a look at some of those a bit later.
So let’s dive in, let’s go into the backend of the Wild Apricot site and let’s do some editing. Now to do editing on your Wild Apricot website you first need to log in as an Administrator. To log in as an Administrator you need to go to your Wild Apricot website. So you wouldn’t log in at wildapricot.com, you would go to the URL that you got when you signed up for Wild Apricot; we would have given you a free URL to use. It would be something like yourorganization.wildapricot.org or, if you’ve already set up your own custom domain name, you would just go to that domain name.
And you will have your log in box in the top right of the header or on the left side of the page underneath the menu. The location will depend, again, on which layout you selected for your theme. So let’s go over to my website right now. So this is my website, ontrackmatt; here it is; ontrackmatt.wildapricot.org. I have my log in box on the top right, so I’ll just log in and then this brings me to the backend of Wild Apricot.
So just to point out some important features in the backend, first we have our tabs, which bring us to a different functionality that we can customize inside of Wild Apricot. The first page you’ll see is your dashboard. This just gives you an overview of everything that’s going on on your website. So we have our tabs to go change different things.
And over to your right we have some important icons. We have our help icon and this is a really interesting tool because, if you hover over this, depending on whatever page you’re on, this will show the link to the Help page for that specific page. So we have our dashboard page, overview of this on our dashboard screen.
We also have the Support icon. Clicking on this will let you open a support ticket directly from your backend, so if you have any questions you click here, File Ticket and send it off to us. And you also have your account number here, so be sure to take note of your account number. Whether you’re on a trial or paid account, you have an account number. So if you ever need to call in for support, you’ll be asked for this number on the top right of your screen.
So let’s get into editing the web page. To edit your website you need to be on your Web Pages tab. So on your Web Pages tab you will see your website here; below you’ll see the pages that you have, you can navigate to the page that you want to edit. Once you’re on the page you want to edit, so let’s say we want to edit this Home page, we simply hit the Edit button at the top of the page.
Clicking on that, we’ll now be in edit mode. As you see, nothing really has changed, there is no code being shown to your or anything like that. But now what we do have is the editor toolbar at the top here where we can do a number of things that you may already be familiar with. We can make text bold, italic, underline, we can insert tables, documents, links, all this stuff up here. To add more content to the page we just click what we want to edit and we can just start typing in what we want to show on the page.
So let’s show some examples of stuff you can do, let’s insert a picture. So I’ll just click where I want the picture to be displayed, I would hit the Picture button, I can then browse and upload a picture from my computer so let’s put this one here, upload, then I will just select it. I can set the size I want for the picture as well as any border, if I want a border, and the location, how the text will flow around it. Then simply hit Insert Picture and there it is on our page.
Some other neat stuff you can do, you can easily make tables on your website by hitting the Table button and Create Table. And basically we just specify the number of rows we want, the number of columns that we want. We can set background colours if we wanted to, set a border; let’s put a thick border on here, like that, and change the border colour to blue. Then hit Insert and there’s our table right here. We can just click inside and start typing content in there.
You can also add links very easily. You can also add documents. You can upload PDF documents, Word documents, other PowerPoint. Whatever files you need to share you can upload it and add a link to your page. You can also edit the HTML if you do need to do that for whatever reason. Sometimes you want to put in a widget from another website or a YouTube video, YouTube will give you a piece of code so you can just click on the HTML button or Script button and just paste in the code that you want, hit Insert and it’ll automatically add it to your site.
Now once we’re done editing the page we simply hit the Save button at the top and our changes will automatically be visible on the website right away. So right after you save it, it’s changed and it’s there for everyone who now goes to the website to be able to see. So that’s how you would edit the main content area of the website.
Let’s take a look at editing the header and the footer now. To edit those sections we need to go to the Settings tab up here. So we’ll just click Settings and you have a whole bunch of tools in this third column under Site Look and Feel. So we can change the theme, the header background or logo, the title; all that stuff here.
The first thing we’re going to look at is the page header. Click on Page Header and you’ll see our header here. And again, you have the same tools. You have the editor toolbar, make your text bold, italic, add an image, like we have here this person in the background. You could also change the background image of the header.
We have a lot of preloaded backgrounds that you can use so, if you don’t have your own image, you can easily just change it to one of these images that we have and set the height to whatever you want it to be. And then just save that when you’re satisfied. So we’ll just actually keep the heading that we have right now, head back to the Settings tab and take a look at editing the footer. And the footer works the same way. So here’s our footer with same tools, same options to put links, tables and so forth in here.
So let’s go back and take a look now at the different themes that you can use. So I’ll just click on the Theme button and you’ll see there are a lot of different variations that you can use. We have, for example, this nature theme in blue here. We also have a variation of it with purple flowers, green grass and that’s just for this one style here. Then we have all these other different styles that you can use, again with different colours, you just click on the one that you want to use.
And there are a couple main differences between the themes besides the colour and the different images there, but you’ll also notice that the menu will be in different places in some of them. For example, this theme up here has the menu down the side; this theme right here has the menu going across the top. We also have themes that are hybrids that have the parent menu along the top of the page and the sub-menu going down the side of the page. So you have a lot of flexibility for how your website looks.
So let’s just choose another theme here so I can give you an example. Let’s go with this blue one here, this one, yes that looks good. Then let’s just hit Finish and you’ll see that it’s changed right away. So once again, everything’s immediate and it’ll change right away on your site.
So we took a look at editing the web pages, editing a header, so let’s take a look at adding and removing pages. So this is done from the Settings tab. Again, under the third column, here under Site Settings, we have an option called Page Management. What Page Management will do, it will give you an overview of your website. So you can see every page that you have on your website as well as the structure or layout of those pages. For example, you can see here we have an About Us page and as a sub page we have History, Competitions, Student Reviews.
Would could also see a lot of information at a glance with these icons here, and the legend is up here above the page titles. So we have these ones are the See Our Content page. So what a content page is is just a regular page that just contains text, images, just an empty page that you can fill out. It could also be thought of as a dumb page because it just sits there and displays your information.
There are also functional pages, such as the Discussion Board, the Events page, Members Only section, their donation form. And basically what these do, they provide a special added function to the website, so rather than just being an empty page full of text and content like the one we just edited, these would actually show a form or show a blog, something special, some kind of functionality to the website.
And you can also see the access for the website with the second column of icons, so this one here shows that these pages are available to anyone who comes to the website. This one with the X shows that this is set to Admin only, so only a logged in Administrator can actually view this page. And these pages here, this Member Only section, is only available to members who are logged in. If you’re not logged in you will not see these pages. Once you’re logged in, you will then have access to these pages. So you can then have sections that are available to the public and sections only for your members, whether they’re paid members, free members. You can specify who gets access to these pages.
Now let’s demonstrate adding a web page. We’ll just click the Add New Page button and then we’ll just set a name for this page. So let’s actually create an application page, I already have one here but let’s just create a second one just to demonstrate that to you. Member Application 2 and the Custom URL would be the web address to this page.
So for example, the main address for my website is ontrackmatt.wildapricot.org. And now for this page here I’m going to call it Sign Up. That means to come to this page you would go to ontrackmatt.wildapricot.org/signup. So you have some flexibility with making it easier to remember the URL for the website. This is also very useful for if you’re doing any search engine optimization to be able to set a custom URL for your page.
We can then set whether it’s a content page or a functional page. If it’s a content page, we have a lot of different options for the layout of the page. You can have two columns, three columns, bigger and smaller columns or divided up for an image directory or something like that. You have all these different options you can choose from.
We’re actually going to set up a functional page so we’ll hit the Functional Pages button here. And then again you can see all the different functional pages you can add, so Discussion Form, Member Application, Member Directory, Event Calendar; you can have a photo album or subscription form, so lots of different options to go with.
So we can select the Member Application option here and then under Access we can set who can access this page. So right now it’s admin only, meaning only Administrators can access it, so this is useful if you’re not done setting it up. You don’t want anyone to see it until you’re ready. If you are ready to have people see it we can set it to Anybody. You have the option for setting it up for only logged in members to see that as well, but it doesn’t make much sense for an application page so we’ll just set this as anybody.
And this current Member Application page, we don’t need two, so we can actually just get rid of this. So you’ll see some options here, you have an option to copy this page if you want to duplicate it, or you can also just delete the page with this option here. So once you hit save, hit Save All Changes and you’ll see that the first Member Application page is gone, now we have our second application page and all the settings that we had set up for that.
So let’s actually take a look at the website now as someone who isn’t logged in as a Member or an Administrator to see how these things look. So I’ll just switch over; here we are. So this page was loaded before we actually started doing any customization. So once those changes have been made, as soon as they refresh the page you’ll see the new layout for the website.
So we now have the new theme, we see that we have the table and a picture added to it and we now have the menu across the top of the page as opposed to down the side. Now here’s our Member Application 2, you’ll see the other one no longer shows up here. So we’ll just click on that and you’ll see we now have our application form that you can go through and fill out.
Let’s take a look at some of the other functional pages that you can have. So this is the Member Application page. You can also have a Donations page if you’re doing any fundraisers; you need to collect some funds. We’ll have the Discussion Board, so you can have some social aspect to your website, have people have conversations and talk about a certain topic. You also have your Events Calendar to show whatever events you have coming up as well. And then you can just click on to the event to get further details and also just register for the event.
Another very useful functional page is the E-mail Subscription form. This form allows people to sign up to receive e-mails from your organization. So maybe they’re not ready to sign up as a member but they want to get more information, they can fill this out, they’ll be added to your database and you can send them e-mails later to follow up on maybe upcoming events that they may be going on.
So let’s just flip back now to the admin side and let’s take a look at some slightly more advanced stuff that you can do with editing the web page. So let’s head back to your Settings tab and what I’ll show you now is the colours and styles that are under Site Look and Feel.
This one allows you to do some more advanced customization without doing any coding at all. Now what you get in this screen is you will get a preview of your website over here in this panel, and over to the left you have different categories with different options of stuff you can change. For example, you have your Global settings where you can change maybe the background colour, you also can change the link colours and so forth. You can [inaudible 19:36] page content and you can change the fonts and the colour of the font for your pages. So let’s actually demonstrate that.
So for the font let’s go with Comic Sans. You’ll see how it changed right away. Now this just for you, it’s not changing right away on the website until you save. But here you can preview it, see your new font that you selected. It also changed the colour of the font, set it to blue. You can also change a number of things with functional pages with the header, the menu, the log in box, the footer, so a lot of things can be customized from just this section without, again, doing any code, just selecting what you want to change, selecting a new colour, the new size, whatever it is you want and then just simply hitting Save. So we’ll hit Save now and you’ll see there’s our changes made right away. So we have the blue font and the Comic Sans font selected here.
Now if you are a web designer or you’re going to be hiring a web designer, you do have the ability to do a lot more advanced stuff using codes, so using CSS customization. Underneath the Settings tab we have an option here called CSS Customization, you just click on that. And what this is, if you’re not familiar with CSS, it stands for Cascading Style Sheets and it’s just a way for web designers to tweak every single aspect of your website through code, so they can move everything around. So if you don’t like our layouts or our themes, they can create a completely different looking site using the CSS section here.
In addition to the CSS Editor, we also have the ability to add JavaScript to your website. This link is under Site Settings, Global JavaScript, we have this editor here and with JavaScript they can do a whole host of other customization from your website.
Now let’s head back into the Settings and I’ll show you another important section. This is the Meta Tag section under Site Settings. You can put in some keywords and a description for your website. So this will be helpful again for search engine customization, you can put some keywords related to your website, so like Matt tutoring, something like that. Raw Headers, this is basically for any advanced stuff you need to do, so just Google Analytics, you can put that in here, your description box, for a description of your website and you just hit Save and you’re done.
So you’ve seen how to edit the web pages, how to edit your header, your footer, how to create new pages and have them automatically show up in your menu and how to do a bit more advanced customization and get ready to be fund by Google and Bing and Yahoo search engines. So the final thing you’ll probably want to do now, once you have all your pages set up and all of these other things set up, is probably to change the domain name that you’re using with your website.
You would do this again from the Settings tab. Under Site Settings we have Domain Name Management. Now on this page you’ll see the free URL that you got from us when you signed up. Now you’re perfectly fine with continuing to just use this URL, there’s no obligation to change it or anything, this is here for you to use. And you can also change this as well. Let’s say you have a URL that’s too long or it doesn’t make sense for your organization or you changed your organization name, you simply hit the Change link next to that and you can type in a new URL to use here.
Now how this would work is that you would need to use of the domains that we provide here. So for example, campseven.org, [onefireplace.org 23:38], memberlodge.com, wildapricot.org, you can choose one of these endings but then you can choose whatever you want for the beginning. So right now I’m on ontrackmatt.wildapricot.org, I can change this to, for example, mattattack and I can change the ending to [onefireplace].com, hit Save and that’ll automatically change the address of year our website. If I have my own domain name I can just hit Add Custom Domain Name and type in the name that I want to use. So for example, www.mydomain.com and hit Save and then this is the URL that Wild Apricot will use.
Now you’ll here that it says “invalid”. That’s because there’s actually two steps to this. One is to enter it into your website so your website knows what its URL is supposed to be. The other thing that you need to do is to actually own this domain name. So if you don’t own the domain name, you need to register as somewhere so you register it as a domain name register. So this is going to be through Wild Apricot but through a different company such as Go Daddy Network Solutions, Netfirms, one of those companies. You just register your domain name, you’ll get your .com or your .org and then you can add it here.
And then you would need to change your settings with that domain register to have the domain name point to our servers. And if you haven’t worked with domain names before and you get stuck with this, as I mentioned earlier, you can just click the Help icon and you’ll see the help page for this. You just click on it and you’ll see all the instructions you need will be right here. And of course you can always just call in and we can walk you through setting that up.
All right, so that pretty much brings me to the end of my presentation. I see that we have some questions so I’ll pass it over to Jay.
Jay: Thanks, Matt. Yes so if you are interested, we actually don’t have any questions just yet but if you are interested in asking a question there’s two ways that you can do that. You can either type in a question and in that case I will just read it aloud to Matt and either Matt or myself will try and answer that for you. Or, if you have a microphone or if you’re using your telephone and you’re feeling brave and you would like to ask the question directly yourself, there is the ability on your screen there to raise your hand. And if you do that, then we’ll call on you and unmute your microphone so that you can talk, and you can ask that question directly.
So we’re just waiting for our first question. Matt, something that we were talking about before hand and I know we didn’t talk about is the idea of being able to put Wild Apricot functionality on other websites. So could you talk about that a little bit?
Matt: Sure. Now with Wild Apricot, as you know, you do get this whole website hosting and everything provided for you. But sometimes you don’t actually need the whole website, sometimes you might just use it for the database purposes and that’s perfectly fine. Sometimes you already have your own website and you want to keep that website because you already have that designed to look the way that you want, in which case you can embed the different functions.
So you can embed, for example, the donation form, the events calendar; all these things you can embed on your other website. And doing that would just show the main content area, so you won’t get the header or the menu so you don’t worry about that, it’ll blend directly in with your current website. And it’s really easy to do.
How you would do that is that you would go to your Settings tab and in the first column of things you will see Widgets. Just click on Get Widgets Code and copy the code for the functionality that you want to bring over. And you can turn any page into a widget to bring over to another website. And it’s as easy as just going to your other website, going into the HTML code and pasting that in there. So whether it’s a custom-built website that you had made or it’s WordPress, Joomla, any of those platforms, you can bring this over and have that work with the website.
Jay: Great. Okay we’re still waiting on questions so, again, if you do have a question, you can either raise your hand or you can type it in. Oh wait, we do have one. Yes, so here’s a question. Do we get e-mail accounts with Wild Apricot?
Matt: So we don’t provide e-mail hosting. Now you can send out e-mails from your website, and there’s no limit or cap on that, you can send out e-mails to anyone you have in your database. Now for receiving e-mails you would need to have your e-mail set up with a different provider. Usually you would get this from your domain name provider; they usually provide you with mailboxes for that.
And there are a lot of other options. One, for example, a lot of people do not know about is Google Apps and with Google Apps you can set up an e-mail address with your domain name, so john@myadmin.com, for free. You can have I believe up to 50 e-mail addresses for free using Google Apps, and that wouldn’t be at gmail.com, it would be at yourdomain.com. And more information on that is on our help page, or you can just send me an e-mail at support@wildapricot.com and I can send you the information on that.
Jay: Yes and actually I just want to say, from a personal perspective, I actually set this up myself and it was a pretty good setup. I was setting up one of my own accounts in Wild Apricot and thinking about mail and setting it up to work along with Google Apps as a separate mail provider. It worked really well. And just asking, what was the e-mail address again; I think if you’re asking about the address for support, the support address is support@wildapricot.com. And any of the questions that you have you can send to that address.
We’re just waiting on any additional questions. Something I wanted to mention while we’re waiting is, with regard to testing out Wild Apricot, you can sign up for a free 30-day trial on our website at wildapricot.com. It’s a totally free trial; we don’t take any credit card information or anything else. So if you go to wildapricot.com and you’re not already trying Wild Apricot, you can do so on our site.
I see we have some hands raised, this is great. So I’m going to unmute David, David are you there? Hello David, can you hear me? I’m not hearing David unfortunately. So David, if you do have a question maybe you can type it in because we’re not hearing you speak unfortunately, so sorry about that.
Let’s try a different one. Let’s try, I believe it’s Bonnie. Bonnie, are you there? Hello? Our audio system isn’t putting people through for some reason, so sorry about that folks. If you do have a question and you’re trying to ask, if you could type in and then we’ll read it out.
We have another question typed in here. Can you add links to other websites on this site?
Matt: Yes. So you have full control over what you put onto the website. So if we, for example, go back into edit mode here, we can add a link to a picture, add a link to text, basically just select the text that you want to have a link on. You have the Link button up here and you can do a link to an anchor, for example, if you wanted to jump to a different place in the page.
You can also just insert a link to another page in the website easily; you have a whole list of all of them here, and then you just link directly to another website. So you type in the website address, the other website, even an e-mail address, add it here and you can say whether to open it in a new window or in the same window and then just hit Insert Link. And that’s for any text on the page. If you wanted to link a menu item to another page, you can do that as well.
Jay: Okay. A question, how do you set up payments?
Matt: So payments, first some background on making payments with Wild Apricot. To collect payments you would need to have an account with a payment gateway, so you would be working directly with that payment gateway, you wouldn’t be going through us; all payments would go directly through them. And this is helpful because then there’s no transaction fees. Some organizations will charge you per transaction, we don’t do that. So basically the only thing it’ll cost you is whatever the payment gateway charges you.
Gateways that we’re integrated are PayPal Standard, PayPal Pro, Google Checkout and Authorize.net. And what you would do is simply go to your Settings tab and under the first column of links, under Finances you would go to Payment Settings, select Online By Credit Card and select which gateway you’re using. So for example with PayPal Standard, which I’m using on my account, all I need to do is enter in my PayPal e-mail address and everything’s integrated in.
PayPal Pro is similar. I put in the PayPal Pro information, so my username and password, a signature. Authorize.net, Transaction TE, Google Checkout, Merchant TE and Merchant ID and that’s basically it. Everything else is taken care of you so, once again, there’s no copying and pasting, any code, no PayPal buttons to work with. Once you put that in, as soon as people fill out your forms they will be taken to a credit card form to check their payments, or take you to a PayPal screen, depending on which gateway that you’re using, and everything just goes straight through to your account; so a very simple, very easy painless process to set that up.
Jay: Great, thanks Matt. So we may have another question here, Dijaris, are you there? Hello?
Dijaris: It’s Dijaris.
Jay: Yes Dijaris, go ahead please.
Dijaris: Okay I was looking under the payment settings, because I am a non-profit organization. So how do you process the donations as non-profit? Or is that something you set up with your payment gateway?
Matt: Yes that would be something you set up with your payment gateway. So when you open with your account with them, basically you would just let them know that you are a non-profit. And you’ll get a lot of benefits from that because a lot of times they do have non-profit pricing as well for their transaction fees. And then basically Wild Apricot would just pass that over to them and it would automatically mark that way in your account.
Dijaris: All right, thank you.
Jay: Great, thanks very much. I’m just corresponding with somebody in the chat and waiting on a question. So yes, if there are any other questions at this time, once again if you wanted to either raise your hand, it seems like we’ve got this audio system working properly, or if you have a question that you want to type in and I can read that out loud, that’s no problem.
Just hopefully waiting for someone to ask a question, I’ll try again here with David. David, go ahead. Can we hear you now? No sorry, David, we’re still having problems hearing you, I’m not sure why. So again, if you have your question still and you wanted to type that in and we can read it for you; sorry, I’m not sure why the audio for you isn’t working.
So once again, if you have any additional questions, I know we’re waiting on some here, please go ahead. I have Laurie, Laurie are you there?
Laurie: Yes. I have a question about events. I don’t really want to pose a detailed question that doesn’t relate to anyone else, so I could pose that question now or call support separately?
Jay: Well go ahead, we’ll leave it to you if you think it’s a question that has some general interest.
Laurie: Okay I’ll make it brief and if you want to take it off line we can do that. My organization sponsors a marathon, it’s a community marathon, and our volunteers need to be stationed on specific locations along the route. And so what we need to be able to do with events is tie tasks to those events. So say one of the volunteers needs to stand at 12th and Main; then when they register for the event they need to be able to select that task. And once the task is selected, someone else can’t choose that task because we don’t need more one person standing at a particular spot.
So that could also work if somebody’s planning an event and somebody wants to bring coffee, you don’t need more than one person to bring coffee. So once that task is selected then we don’t want to make it available for other people to choose. So is there some kind of task-related option to events?
Matt: Well what you can do is you can limit the overall number people who can register for the event. But for either using a registration type or one of the fields in there, there isn’t a way to limit that. That is something that is on our wish list though, because that’s come up before. But right now the only way to really do that would be to create a separate event for each one, which isn’t really practical.
So what you would do with – now you would get an e-mail every time someone signs up, so if you created just one event for your volunteers and set up a registration type for those different positions, then once you get that e-mail in you can just disable that registration type would probably be the best way of doing that.
Laurie: Right, okay. Since you said it’s on the wish list, is there a date in mind for when that might be available?
Matt: There isn’t. It really depends because the features could end up taking longer than expected to be put in so there’s no set timeline. But it is something that is pretty high up there so it could probably be coming in the next couple events, maybe by the end of this year or maybe early next year. I couldn’t tell you for sure.
Laurie: Okay. All right thank you.
Jay: Thanks. And just to be, I’m always cautious about telling people that, if there’s something that you really need that we don’t have, we don’t frankly recommend that you sign up on the basis of us having it, unless it’s something that we’ve kind of said for sure is going to be in a future release. Because we always end up moving things around and things that we think might take six months could end up taking a year and a half.
So unless it’s a feature we already have, and I would say this is generally true for all software, if it’s a feature we don’t already have, I’d say look at other solutions for that. Maybe you can use Wild Apricot in concert with something else, or use a different system. But we don’t like people to be unhappy so we always tell people to be careful about trying to use a piece of software for things that they might do in the future, whether it’s us or anything else.
One other question that we have; can you put pictures on the membership directory?
Matt: Yes. So in your membership directory, let’s go to the one I have here. In our directory here, so we have three people listed here already, our directory is set up to just show their name, occupation and their membership level, so we can actually edit this and we can select to show pictures as well, which I’ll do right now. Personal Photo, save that and you’ll see the pictures are here in the directory as well, and also, if you click in [inaudible 40:17].
So you have a lot of options for what fields you provide for people setting up as a member. So you can add an image field for a picture, you can drop down list, multiple choice options, which I’ll actually just show you quickly here. This is under the Settings tab under Membership Fields and these are the fields that I currently have for the website.
So not many, but you’ll see here is our personal picture, Personal Photo field, you can click on Add New Field and here’s the different types that I have. So text box, Multi-Line Text Box, Multiple Choice Video buttons, I can have a field to add extra costs to the application as well as rules and terms that people need to agree to before they sign up for the website. So you have a lot of flexibility there. You can add your own fields; they’re not pre-defined by us. You can add whatever fields you want to the profile and to the application form.
Jay: Great. We’re going to try one more time with David. David, are you there this time? Sorry David, I’m not sure why we’re having problems with your audio. So if you do have a question, you can either type it in or what we would suggest is, if you’d like to send a message to our support team, you can do that at support@wildapricot.com, or you can also look online, we also have an 800 number that you can call.
I think might have another question. Dijaris, are you there?
Dijaris: Yes, can you hear me?
Jay Moonah: Yes, go ahead.
Dijaris: Okay. Can you do an e-newsletter from this site?
Matt: Yes. So you can e-mail your members or your non-members, whoever you want to e-mail. Basically you would just go to either your Contacts tab if you want to get to everyone, or your Members tab for just members, I’ll show that to you here. From my Members tab I can see all the members I have on the website. I can just hit E-mail Members and then I have the opportunity to, if I’ve already sent out an e-mail, I can copy previous e-mail or I can use a draft. Since I haven’t sent out an e-mail yet from this website, I get a new e-mail here. Type in the subject, type in the message and, again, you can do all your formatting, insert tables, design a newsletter-looking e-mail.
And a cool thing about our e-mails is that you can use macros. So you’ll see here it says there Contact First Name, Contact Last Name, this will get replaced when it’s sent out, whatever information you have on that person from the database. And we have this Macro button that’s available when you’re editing e-mails and you see all the different macros available. So you can do things like their organization, e-mail address, phone number, all this stuff is available to insert into the e-mail.
Jay: All right. Does that answer your question?
Dijaris: Yes. And then we would just put the link to the e-newsletter there, right, for it.
Matt: Yes. So you can just e-mail this to everyone and it’ll just go automatically. You would just type e-mail in here. Or, if you have a PDF or something, then yes you can put the link in this e-mail.
Dijaris: Okay.
Jay: All right, thanks. We’ll take one more question that we have here and the question is, it’s actually one that I can answer. So it’s, how long has Wild Apricot been in existence? And I can tell you that we have a parent company, currently called Bonasource, although we’re actually I think moving towards changing the name to be just Wild Apricot. The Bonasource is a software company that’s been around for I think just about 12 years now.
And then the Wild Apricot software, we’re going to be celebrating the fifth anniversary of Wild Apricot as a specific software product, which is now the only product from Bonasource. So it’s a company with a long history. We have a high Better Business Bureau rating; we’re Microsoft Certified partners, so we’re a company with some history. And we currently have, I think we’re up to about 3800 paid customers and then we have a number of folks who are using our free service. So we’ve been around and we plan to be around for a while. So yes, we’re a company with some history and hopefully with a long future as well.
So we’re going to stop it there. Once again, if you have questions that weren’t answered, please send them to our support team and Matt or one of his colleagues will be more than happy to answer. support@wildapricot.com, or you can look on our website for the 800 number.
Thanks again for joining us and we’re going to post this presentation in a day or so time. We’ll post it up on YouTube and get it up on the website within a couple of days, so if you or any of your colleagues want to check it out.