Website Publishing Setup
To open the Website Publishing Setup form, click on Setup in the shortcut or drop-down menu, then click on Other, then click on Website Publishing.
If your company has a web site, Smart Contractor can make job information available to your customers on your website. This information can include any documents generated by Smart Contractor, including:
- Allowance Schedule
- Allowance Cost Variances
- Change Orders
- Invoices (Draw Requests)
- Draw Schedule
- Job Progress
- Job Recap
- Job Schedule
- Job Site Photos
When Smart Contractor puts customer job information on your web site, separate web pages (one for each job) are created under your company's web site. Customers access their web page by entering www.companywebsite.com/customerlogin (where "companywebsite" is your website name) into their browser address prompt.
This will bring up a page that prompts for their Customer Name and Password. They will enter the name and password that you enter in the Customer Name, and Web Access Password prompts in the Edit Customer form.
When they enter these and click Login, they will be taken to the web page for their job.
To be able to put customer job information on your web site, you must meet the following requirements:
- You have a web site.
- Your web site host provides you with FTP (File Transfer Protocol) access to your web site folder.
- Your FTP login account has read/write/delete access to the web site folder.
This is typical of a situation where you (or your web site developer) develop your web site on your computer and upload it to your web site host. Some web site hosts (known as "web site in a box") only allow you to use their web based editing tools to develop your web site online. This type of web site will not work with Smart Contractor.
If you have a web site with read/write/delete access via FTP, then you can set Smart Contractor up to create and update customer job web sites. Then, when you exit Smart Contractor, the Exit form will include an option to Publish To Web Site. Click Run Exit Options to automatically create and update your customers' web sites. If you want to update the web sites without exiting Smart Contractor, you can use the Publish To Web Site option in the Utilities Menu.
The Web Site Publishing Setup form has the following prompts:
| Publish Customer Job Info To Company Web Site: |
| Check this option to enable Smart Contractor to publish customer job information to your web site. |
| Company Web Site FTP Address: |
| Enter the FTP access address for your web site. This can be in the form of a URL (example: ftp://ftp.companysite.com/), or an IP address (example: 123.12.23.123). |
| FTP Login Username: |
| Enter your FTP login username. |
| FTP Path: |
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Some web servers store the files of the web page in a folder below the folder accessed by FTP. If that is true in your case, enter the web site folder path here. Important: Remember that UNIX based servers are case sensitive. This means that if your web hosting server is not a Windows server, then the path name must be spelled using the correct case for each letter. |
| FTP Login Password: |
| Enter your FTP login password. |
| FTP Port Number: |
| Enter the FTP Port Number, which is typically 21. |
| Customer Login Path: |
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Enter the path name that your customers will use to access the customer login page on your website. For example, if you set the customer login path to "customerlogin", and your website URL is www.CompanyName.com, then your customer will type "www.CompanyName.com/customerlogin" into their web browser address to get to their login page. NOTE: If you use more than one Smart Contractor database, then the customer login path name must be different in each database. If they are named the same in more than one database, then when you publish customer information to your website, the customer login information from one database will be overwritten by the customer login information from the other database. |
| Format Pages For iFrames: |
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Check this option if you will be displaying the uploaded customer web pages in iFrames within your company website. If you check this option, Smart Contractor will not format each page with page heading (your company logo, address, etc.). |
| How To Customize Web Page Formatting |
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Smart Contractor allows you to customize the appearance of the uploaded customer web pages so that they will conform to the appearance of your company website. To customize the uploaded web pages, you must edit the "SC_Style.css" file in the C:\Program Files\Smart Contractor program folder. If you are not familiar with CSS style coding, then you can have your website developer do this for you. If your website developer is not available, then you can request Smart Contractor technical support to assist you with this. If you are familiar with CSS style coding, then edit the "SC_Style.css" file and add or modify the styles for the following HTML tags:
The links to uploaded job documents are displayed in a table in the customer web page. The link is in the left column, and the description of the document is in the right column. The following two styles are used to format the columns in the link table:
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