Building A Bright Network
Ok, so you’ve looked at the option of building a Bright site, but you need more. Specifically, because:
- You want to control who gets access to what content
- You want to give individual content authors control over their own domains
- You want to split the content up in some meaningful way beyond what is available with categories.
- You are interested in white-labelling Bright for your own customers.
In that case, you might need to go with your own Bright Network.
My Own Bright Network?
Basically, it’s a number of Bright Sites, linked together within a common network. Although the sites themselves act semi-autonomously, as the network administrator, you would have overarching control of all the sites in the network.
Setting up a Bright Network is a bit more complicated that building a single Bright Site, but luckily, most of the processes are the same. This article aims to give you a checklist of the steps involved so that you can gauge how much work it’s going to be.
Creating A Bright Network
Step 1. Get Aura to assign the Network for you.
Ok, this is the easy part. Just get in touch with us and ask us to set up a Network for you. You’ll need to have a log-in on Bright Network already, so that we can make you the administrator. Let’s say your network is called ‘johnsnet’. Initially, you would have the domain:
johnsnet.aurabright.com
Step 2. Change the Domain Name
Likelihood is, the domain name above is not going to be the one you want to live with. You might have reseved:
johnsnet.com
To use this instead, first, from your DNS, you need to point your domain to our server. This means people entering johnsnet.com in a browser will end up at aurabright.com.
Step 3: Network Settings
Next, you must decide:
- Do you want your network to be open for anyone to sign up to? Or invitation only?
- Do you want anyone to be able to create a site on it? Or do you want control over that?
- What should the invitation emails look like?
Step 4: Set Up Your Hub Site’s Theme
The next thing to do is to theme the Hub Site. This is the site that will appear when someone navigates to johnsnet.com.
Go through the list of themes that are available in Bright, and activate the one you like best. Most of the themes have lots of options to futher customise them. For example:
- Colour Scheme that will be used
- Header graphics
- Background graphics
- How the page is laid out (number of columns, for example)
- Widgets (these are areas of the theme reserved for content other than the main body article)
This can often take a fair bit of time to sort out, but if you have an idea of what you want, then you can contract Aura to build it according to your design. Again, contact us about that.
Step 5: Set up Your Hub Site’s Content
Within your Hub site, you are likely to want to add content to describe exactly what your offering is, and how people should use it. For example:
- Help Pages
- Pricing & Charging Pages
- Instructions on how to sign up
- Links to example content
- The Menu structure that will appear on the page
A good tip is to figure our a sitemap beforehand listing out the content you need to cover -if you have a structure in mind beforehand, you won’t repeat yourself. Another helpful feature of Bright Network is our Syndication Tool, which allows you to use our help text, but rebranded to your own network.
Step 6: Set up Your Hub Site’s Settings
By this we mean making decisions about:
- Can people post comments on your site?
- Is it crawlable by search engines?
- Is it open to the public? Or invitation only?
Step 7: Template Theming
When one of your trainers creates a domain in your network, it will start out with a URL based on a subdomain off your network. e.g.
trainer1.johnsnet.com
Each of these sites is generated based on a template that you own. When your network is first created, the template site is here:
template.johnsnet.com
So, an important part of building your network is to say exactly what the out-of-the-box site will look like. Just as in step 4, you will need to make theming decisions about what the template will look like.
Step 7: Template Default Content
You might want to create some default content for your template site, to demonstrate features or advertise services to new users.
Step 8: Template Default Settings
Much like in Step 6, you will need to decide what the default privacy settings are for new sites in your network. We recommend making them private at first, giving content authors a chance to arrange things before the madding hordes visit it. Remember – the template just sets up default settings, these can be changed by the site administrator later.
Step 9: Just Add Users
The final step is to start inviting people onto your network to start using it. You can use our bulk registration tool to sign up a number of people based on their email addresses.