Smart Contractor Web Publishing Setup Options

Web Site Publishing Setup

To open the Web Site Publishing Setup form, click on Setup in the shortcut or drop-down menu, then click on Other, then click on Web Site Publishing.

If your company has a web site, Smart Contractor can make job information available to your customers on your web site. This information includes:

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:

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.