Planning Your Membership Structure
What do you want Membership to do on your website?
Before you begin setting up policies and accepting members it is important to plan out how you want your site membership to work and how you intend on interacting with your members.
- Do you only want members to sign up for newsletters?
- Do you want to restrict access to files or pages?
- Do you want to give discounts to your members?
- Do you want to allow members to sign up by themselves, or will you add them manually?
- What information do members need to sign up with?
In Spinsoft Website Builder there are many ways membership can be setup, to cover the different needs of each website. You can control wether or not your site uses policies, what policies to use if you are using them, wether or not members can sign up, and what information they sign up with.
Below are some different example structures so you can see what situation best suits your needs
Example Structure 1: Newsletters Only
In this situation you only want members to sign up for newsletters or special offers that you may want to send out at some point. You don't need to use policies since members and non-members can both access all areas of your website.
This structure is quite easy to setup since there are no policies involved, and since members are only signing up for newsletters you really only need to collect minimal information about them.
Membership Mode: Open Member Mode
Polices: None
Groups: Subscribed & Unsubscribed
Registration Information: Email, Firstname, Lastname (the minimum information you need is email).
Custom Profile Information: None
Registration: Members can sign up themselves
The best way to set this type of site up is to either use the existing Special Panel "Newsletter Signup Panel" where visitors simply enter their email, or you can create your own panel with a custom registration form since you may want to also get their name.
You may decide you want to collect more registration information, such as gender, country etc. Once our membership module is released you will be able to target newsletter campaigns at certain demographics.
Example Structure 2: Basic Page & Download Restrictions
For this type of structure you generally want to collect some additional information, and will setup a number of groups to put your members in. Because you want to restrict access to certain pages or files, or both, you need to make sure you run in policy mode.
Note that it is important to test any membership structure out, but you need to be particularly careful and test out the policies you put in place when policies are involved. If you are not careful you could restrict access to your entire website.
Membership Mode: Member Policy Mode
Polices: Either setup a Full Access Policy to allow access to all of your pages/files, then restrict the pages/files you want, or setup a Full Access Policy to restrict access to all of your pages and then allow the pages/files you want for unregistered members.
Groups: Subscribed, Unsubscribed, Any custom groups depending on how many levels of access you need.
Registration Information: Email, Firstname, Lastname, Gender, Password
Custom Profile Information: You might want add some custom information for special interests so that you can manually put your members into more relevant groups.
Registration: Members can sign up themselves, but you might want to manually setup some members in groups for special access to certain areas.
The best way to setup this kind of structure is to have a link going to a registration page, where you can collect the information you need. This setup can be as simple or as complicated as you need, and you may want to prepare this type to also take newsletters down the track.
This structure might be used for:
- A free pass page that visitors can only get if they register first.
- A setup where you have clients that should have access to special areas, and you enter these clients manually. In this case you may want to turn of the setting 'Accept Website Registrations'
Example Structure 3: Standard E-commerce Registration
With this system you need to collect the most personal information since you will be handling orders and most likely online payments, so you need information like country etc. If have a general online shop setup, then you generally won't use policies since everyone can access all areas of the site.
Membership Mode: Open Member Mode
Polices: None.
Groups: Subscribed & Unsubscribed.
Registration Information: Email, Firstname, Lastname, Gender, Phone, Address, City, Country, Password
Custom Profile Information: None.
Registration: Members can sign up themselves.
For this structure you can use the built in registration form since it is setup to handle all of the information you would need to collect for e-commerce members.
This structure could be changed to add in Policy Mode if you wanted to put some people into special groups and give them a membership discount policy.
Other Structures:
The three basic structures above can be combined to give you all sorts of membership structures, you can collect as little or as much information as you need, and you can control basically every aspect of how users interact with your website based on their membership.
Once other modules are released, such as our Subscription Module, you will be able to setup your membership in even more ways.
For more information on the specific settings such as policy mode, please see the topic "Learn about member settings"
