Basic Site Setup

Article Topics: Sites, Tours, Members, Affiliates, Join Options, Templates, Programs

Creating a Site

Basic Site Setup begins with the creation of a new site in NATS. You can add a site by navigating to the Site Management tab of the Sites Admin and clicking the "Add a Site" button at the top-right of the page.

Fill in the Site and Tour Details and click "Add a Site". You can get a more detailed breakdown of what each option means on our Creating a New Site in NATS page.

Once your Site and Tour have been created, you can then Customize the Template for your Signup Page. Navigate to the Sites Management section of NAT, select the Site that contains the Tour you wish to edit then select the tour. Click on the "Templates" tab and locate the Join Page template labeled "join."

Once you have located it, duplicate your template by clicking the "Actions" button and selecting the "Duplicate Template" button from the dropdown. We recommend that you duplicate your join template so that you can retain your original form if you need to quickly revert to it.

Once you have duplicated your join template, either click the "Actions" button then click "Edit Template" or click the name of the duplicated Join Form to start customizing your Join Form.

To learn how to test your Join Forms, see our Testing Your Signup Templates article, or see our Customizing your Join Form to learn how to customize your signup page.

Setting up Site Email

Next, it's advised to set specific "from" and "reply-to" details for Member and Affiliate emails. With these settings, you can define details for each of your sites so the email address used will be specific for every site rather than for your NATS installation as a whole.

To set the email settings for each of your sites, navigate to the Sites Admin and click the Site you would like to set the email addresses for.

Under the Member Email Site Settings and Affiliate Email Site Settings sections, you can edit the email addresses and nice name

"EMAIL_FROM_" and "EMAIL_FROM_NICE_" set the address and the nice name for the from address for emails.
"EMAIL_REPLY_" and "EMAIL_REPLY_NICE_" set the address and nice name for a reply-to address.
"EMAIL_BCC_TO_" set an email address you would like to get a blind carbon copy of any emails sent.

Setting Up Welcome Emails

When a member purchases a subscription to your site, it provides you the perfect opportunity to inform them of what's included with their membership, upcoming discounts and deals, and much more. This can be done on the Email tab of any Tour.

Learn more about setting up welcome emails on the Mailing Members after a Join page.

Setting up Approval, Denial, and Upgrade Pages

Once you have your Site created and Site Email settings in place, the next step is setting up Approval, Denial, and Upgrade pages for your Tours. These are the pages visitors see when they are approved for purchases, denied for whatever reason, are upgrading a membership, etc.

These settings can also be used to specify a page to redirect users to upon upgrade approval for example.

To modify these templates, click the Tours tab of the Site Overview page, select the tour, and click the Pages/Steps tab.

If you don't enter these URLs, NATS will assume you want all traffic leaving the biller's page to go to this tour's default approval and denial templates.

Important: By default, the Approval and Denial templates are blank. If you do not set the Approval URL while editing your site in the Sites Admin, your members may be charged twice. After submitting their payment information, the member is supposed to be redirected to the Approval URL -- but if this value is blank, the member's Web browser will reload the payment submission page, potentially processing the member's payment twice.

If your Approval URL is correct and members are still being charged twice, please submit a support ticket.

To learn more about each template and its respective function, see the List of Default Templates article.

Setting up Biller Details

Once the necessary URLs have been configured, navigate to the Billers Tab of the Site you are setting up. Here, you can fill in your biller information or see the individual Biller Instructions section for details. You can access these by clicking the "+" aside each biller.

Learn how to add a Biller to NATS in the Setting up a Biller in NATS article.

Setting up Join Options

Next, we'll need to set up join options for your site, dictating the various membership plans a visitor can purchase for your site.

To do so, we'll need to go back to our list of Sites in the Sites Admin by clicking the "Back to Site" button at the top right of the page, or by navigating to the Sites Admin and selecting our Site again.

Once there, you can add a new join option by filling in the initial cost and days, the recurring cost and days (optional if your join option doesn't recur), the join form text, and the appropriate Biller codes. After you have filled in these fields, click Save.

Learn more about Creating Join Options on the How to Create a New Join Option page.

Setting up Programs

Lastly, you will need to create programs for your newly created site and add them to the Tours we have just created. If you have not yet created a New Program, please see How to Add and Remove Programs. Once you've created your program, you can enable it on your tours.