Getting Started

OK, you may want to print this checklist, but it's a great guide to the steps you'll want to take to make your site your own. Just follow the steps through one after the other and you'll quickly have something that reflects you and your organisation's needs.  (The first eight steps, customising your site’s content, can be done in a morning.)

• The first thing you will need to do is to login to your website and go to My Area | My Profile to check and amend your personal and family details.
• Read the Web SITE tour on the Home page of your web site to get an overview of what’s possible for your users.
• Then, read the Web OFFICE tour available at www.ChurchInsight.com/QuickStartGuides to gain an overview of the admin tools available only to selected users of your site. When you have done this go to the Web Office on your site and do the following:

• Change the web site’s Group Structure to reflect your ministry
  i.e. click in turn on each folder in the Site Manager group structure on the left of the Web Office screen and on the Advanced Settings option on the Summary page for that folder either

  1. Leave the name and security visibility settings as they are
  2. Or change the folder’s name or security settings
  3. Or add a new folder underneath this one (e.g. sub-folders for each kids’ group)
  4. Or delete a folder
  5. Or change the display order of the folders
     
     This work should take you an hour or so to complete and will produce your site’s menu structure. (Note that group folders will not appear in the site’s menu structure until you have at least one document published in the folder…that way your menu structure won’t produce any dead-ends to frustrate your visitors!)
     
• Then, click on the “root group” or top level folder for your site and select the Members tab. Note how one of the tasks is to “Import records from a file”. It may take you a while to produce a comma separated values file (CSV) in, say, an Excel spreadsheet, but it is well worth the time. Make sure that you have details for just one person per row and each piece of information in a separate column e.g. Gender, First name, Last name, Address 1, … 2, …3, Town, County, Postcode, Country, Home phone, Work phone, Mobile phone, Email, Date of birth.
  
  Once you have created your CSV file it is a simple matter to import the record details to your site's database, mapping the fields in your file to those in ChurchInsight.
  
• Then, select the Members tab for each group folder and add the appropriate people, where you know the details. (Once you have issued usernames and passwords to your members they will be able to login and personalise this by choosing My Area | My Involvement.) i.e. Put men into Men’s ministry, women into Women’s ministry, and so on. You can click the “up” arrow next to a group member’s name to make him or her a leader of the group – this data is used in the production of your organisation chart reports – see www.ChurchInsight.com/Reports for examples.
  
• Then, select the Permissions tab for each group and decide who the leader is and what permissions you want the leader(s) to have to that folder. Note that an individual will receive permissions to that folder and all folders below it; similarly, if you give someone membership of a folder then they are a member of that folder and all folders above it.
  
  LOGIN and read the Implementation Guide at www.ChurchInsight.com/Support for more detail.
  
• You can then use ChurchInsight’s built-in mailing tool to send a message just to group leaders asking them to login, go to the Web Office and start creating content for their folder on the Documents and Events tabs. By putting calendar events in the appropriate group folder it will be possible for your members to personalise the calendar to show only events that they have an interest in.
  
• Meanwhile, work on the documents in the “About Us” folder. This is the brochure content of your site that probably won’t change very often and you’ve probably got much of the content here written somewhere already. Typically each folder in the About Us section will contain just one document (e.g. “Contact Us”) that is made the group’s Home page by clicking the house icon next to the article on the Documents tab for that folder in the Web Office Site Manager. It’s good policy to set a short home page article for each folder on your site.
  
• In time, get someone who understands how to do computer graphics well to read the THEMES guide at www.ChurchInsight.com/QuickStartGuides and to start customising your site’s graphical look and feel to use your colours, fonts, photos, logo and chosen layout of information. If you don’t have someone with these skills then we will do that for you at an agreed price in response to your design brief. 

If you have technical questions, please email support@churchinsight.com to gain a case number that enables you to track progress of your query online and to ensure that the best person is able to respond as quickly as possible.