FAQs

Starting Your Site

How do I build my icompendium website without taking my current website down?
I’ll provide a different link for your icompendium site that allows you to build it without interrupting your current site. Once you are finished building your icompendium site, we can swap out your current site for your icompendium one. This is done by changing the name server settings at the company where you bought your domain name. More information this here.

How do I send my site live?
If you own your domain name, you need to login to the company’s website where you purchased your domain name and change the name server there. More information on this here.

Once my site is live how do I make changes to it?
You can login to your site at yourname.com/login to make change any of the content. You always have full control over the content.

How do I turn off pages I won't use?
At the top of every page in the Admin Panel, you can hide it by setting the drop down immediately below the name it to ‘hidden,’ and clicking Save Changes.

Can I build my site out over time?
Yes. If you don’t have a lot of images ready, but want to get your site online asap, that’s OK, and will actually allow search engines to find you sooner than later. Also, you can hide pages you don’t want to use (for instance, maybe you don’t even want an image gallery up yet) and just show a home page image and contact page if you want.

Can I point another domain to my site?
No problem. Just purchase the domain someplace like godaddy.com and follow the steps to send it live.
And let me know about it, since I’ll have to add it on my side too.

How do I re-order the links?
Go the Admin Home, and choose 'More Options...' in the upper right hand corner to re-order the links.

Setting Up Image Galleries

How many image galleries can I create?
You can create as many image galleries as you want. To add new image galleries, go to any existing image gallery and choose ‘Advanced’ in the upper right hand corner and then check ‘yes’ next to ‘Create new image gallery’ and save changes.

How do I add a statement to an image gallery?
There are several ways to add text within an image gallery. Perhaps the easiest way is within the image gallery Advanced options, 'Image Gallery Description' field. But, if you want to add even more text, immediately below ‘Image Gallery Description’ you can click on ‘Full Length Statement’ to add a full page of text. (This feature is fairly new, and not everyone may have it. If you don't see it, let me know.)

How do control the number of images per page?
You can set this in the image gallery’s Advanced options. Look for the ‘Images per Page’ setting about a third of the way down the page.

How do I add new pages in an image gallery?
New pages are automatically created based on your ‘Images per Page’ setting in the image gallery’s Advanced Options. So if you set it to 2 images per page and you upload 5 images, you will have 3 pages -- the first 2 with 2 images each, and the last with 1 image.

How do I turn on video/audio capabilities?
There is an available ‘videos’ page that is fairly new and you may not see on your site, and you can use this to import videos you upload at icompendium.com/video. Once it's uploaded here, go to your 'video page' and click the button 'Copy changes from icompendium.com/video to here.' Then, your video should appear on your 'video' pages, and in any image gallery in which the Advanced options > Enable video package is checked.

I am a writer, how do I add pages of text behind my images?
Go to the image gallery Advanced options and next to ‘Enable writer’s package’ check ‘Yes’ and Save Changes. This will add an option to add ‘Long text’ next to each image. Then whenever your text into the ‘Long text’ section that image will click through to a page of text rather than an enlarged image.

How do I remove the 'Describe your image gallery here...' text?
Go to the Admin Panel, and then go to that image gallery's advanced options. Scroll down until you see the 'Image Gallery Description' text box. You should see it there and be able to delete it out.

How do I sell work with PayPal?
You can turn on the PayPal shopping cart features in any image gallery's advanced options. More on this here...

Uploading Images

How do I set the thumbnail size?
You can set this the image gallery Advanced options, but it will only apply to images uploaded after it is set. If you want to resize existing thumbnails, you can reset the thumbnail height and the ‘replace’ the image (you don’t need to delete it) and the new image should appear with the new thumbnail size.

Why do some images have pop-ups from the largest image?
When you upload an image, a thumbnail and enlarged image are created automatically. If the uploaded image happens to be more horizontal than vertical, and larger than 480 px wide, the enlarged image may also click through to a pop-up. If you uploaded a vertical image, then chances are a pop-up will not appear since the enlarged version may fill a lot of the vertical space on your monitor.

Why isn't my image uploading?
There could be a few reasons. Here are a few questions to ask:

Is the image less than 2mb in size?
Is the image in jpg format, with a ‘.jpg’ extension?
Are there any unusual characters in the image name such as ‘?”(){}^’ ?
Is the image 72 dpi?

More information on preparing your images exists here

Why is my enlarged image so tall on the screen?
A vertical and horizontal enlarged image both have the same maximum width. Because of this, the vertical enlarged image may appear unusually large. The way around this is to upload a vertical image that is no taller than you want it to appear on the page.

Can I create my own thumbnail, enlarged and largest size image in PhotoShop and use that?
You can – this feature is intended for advanced users that want to bypass icompendium image compression, since most users should never need to make their own thumbnail and enlarged images. But if you want to, first you’ll need to upload the image normally, and then in the Admin Panel below the image, you should see a small very subtle white pill-shaped image you can click. This will open a pop-up that allows you to input your own thumbnail, enlarged, and pop-up image.

Contact Section

Can I hide my email address?
Yes. The best way to do this is to only activate the contact form. But be sure that your email address field is unchecked (but your email address is entered) and that the contact form is checked.

How do I stop spam from the contact form?
It’s possible that a spammer could send spam email through the contact form. But there are several ways to prevent this. First – if you get a lot of spam through your contact form, let me know about it, and I’ll double check that spam blocking is up to date. Then, once it is, if spam is still a problem, you can activate a simple English question (ie. “What color is the sky?” -- you can edit these) that must be answered when someone submits the form. Most users don’t use this, but it’s available for anyone that may be a spam target.

How do I see who has added their email address to my mailing list?
In the Admin Panel contact section look at the mailing list section (first section) and click on the ‘manage’ link. From here, you should be able to see all the email addresses that have been added.

Can I have an @yourname.com email address?
Yes. The easiest way to use this (and set this up) is as a forwarding address. But, if you want to send email from that address, you can do that as well. The best way to set that up is using Google Apps. More information at google.com/a

Bio, Resume, Statement Sections

Can I upload a PDF for my bio, statement or resume?
Yes. Towards the bottom of each of those pages, check ‘yes’ next to ‘Offer a PDF for download.’ Click Save Changes. Then, below, you can upload your own PDF to replace auto-generated one.

Can I create more bio or text pages?
Yes. This is a fairly new option, so if you don’t see this on your site yet and would like it there, please let me know. Go to the Bio page and click ‘Advanced’ and here you can check ‘yes’ next to ‘Create a new text/ bio page.’

Why doesn't my bio picture seem to upload?
You may have to refresh your browser to see this, since browsers can often remember the old image. To refresh your browser, hold down ‘shift’ on your keyboard and click ‘reload’ on your browser. Certain browsers are harder to refresh. For instance, if you are you using Safari, you may need to go to the Safari menu, choose ‘Empty cache…’ and click ‘ok,’ then reload your page.

Bibliography Section

Can I upload PDFs?
You can upload PDFs. There are a couple ways to do this, but the way that I recommend is uploading the PDFs to your http://icompendium.com/video account. Even though this section was designed for video and audio, it will allow you to keep track of any files that may happen to be somewhat large, and these don’t count against the storage limit for your images. Once you upload it there, you should be able to see a link to the file at something like: http://media.icompendium.com/yourfile.pdf and you can then set the bibliography item to display by ‘Link’ and then pasting the following into the link field: media.icompendium.com/yourfile.pdf

How do I turn off the categories that I won't use?
At the top of the bibliography section in the Admin Panel, you should see a list of the three available categories: Books and Catalogues, Articles and Reviews, Selected Website Listings. All of these are checked by default, but not many artists may have listings of all three sections. Uncheck sections you don’t want to use and click ‘Save Changes’ at the bottom of the page.

Video/Multimedia

What kinds of files can I upload?
All kinds! The files you upload should be recognized, and displayed accordingly. So, whether you upload an .mp3, .mov, .f4v file, it should be recognized and displayed correctly. Also, you can use the http://icompendium.com/video section to upload large files, such as high-res images or multi-page image-heavy PDFs that you can link to from you icompendium site. More on how to import these files into your site here.

How do I add these files to my icompendium site?
There are a couple ways to do this. One way is get the ‘embed code’ from that’s provided at icompendium.com after your file is uploaded, and paste this somewhere on your icompendium site.

Can you embed a video that's hosted elsewhere like youtube.com?
Yes. You’ll just need the embed code from that site. Copy and paste into your icompendium site where you want the video to appear.

Login Settings

If I hide the login link, where can I login?
You can always login at yourname.com/login. If your site is not live yet, you can go to the website address sent in the getting started email, and add ‘/login’ to the end of that web address and login there.

How do I create users that can view private content?
You can do this on the login page as well. You just need to create a new username and password for each person in the ‘Add a private user’ section at the bottom of the Login page.

Email

Can you set up an @yourname.com forwarder for me?
No problem. Just let me know what the address should be and where it should forward.

What's the best way to set up a separate email account for my @yourname.com email?
Google Apps is the best, I believe. There are other ways to do it, and some other web hosts even provide an email service along with the hosting, but the level of reliability will likely not match Google Apps. Not only is it free, but if you happen to switch web hosts in the future, you can keep all your email in the same place.

I already have an @yourname.com email account at my current webhost, how do I switch away from them?
Google Apps allows you to use POP and IMAP retrieval to import your email history from your former email provider. The next order of business is to verify you own your domain with Google. They’ll instruct you to add an HTML page to your site that only they will see (I can help you add this) and once this is up, they know you own the domain.
Once finished, you are ready to change the MX records to point to Google’s mail servers. If you can't change your MX records, let me know and I'll make sure you can get this working.

Creating Categories and Sub-categories

Can I create multiple categories with a single category (nested links) page?
You can do this. It’s a fairly new feature, and I haven’t added it to all the sites just yet. If you see ‘create new nested links page’ in the Advanced section of your nested links page, check this and Save Changes. If you need to do this and can’t, let me know.

What types of content can I add on a nested links page?
There’s a fairly new feature that allows any type of content page to be nested, and this may not be applied to your site yet. If you need to do this and can’t let me know.

Misc.

How can I see the number of visitors to my site?
Google Analytics is recommend for this. It’s free, just sign-up and add the JavaScript snippet they give you into the Google Analytics textbox on your website. (They may give you a choice of using an "old or new tracking code." Either is fine, but the new one is recommended.)

Why isn't my site appearing when I search for it?
It can take some time for Google and the other major search engines to find and catalogue your site. The best thing to do immediately is get others to make links to your site. Here’s some more information on getting good search results.

Why did PayPal cancel my subscription?
In some rare cases, PayPal cancels subscriptions for no clear reason. BUT, this has no effect on your website! It only means that when renewal time comes I’ll send along an email to submit payment and re-activate the subscription. So the only thing this changes is that the billing is not automatic. It has no effect one whether your site stays up or down.