As an administrator, you can set up classified advertising for your own web-site. This will add a valuable service to your site, allowing you to be a portal onto appropriate advertising content.

You can

• create your own categories
• define the structure of each template
• support for sale and wanted adverts
• allow advertisers to include a picture (hosted elsewhere)
• allow advertisers to link to their own web page for more information
• include your own categories as well as others published by other administrators
• brand the advertising section as your own
• show in a sub-frame as well as its own window

Step 1) Register yourself as a new administrator

Once you have completed the registration form you will then be taken to your home page from which you will be able to manage the service in future. On the first visit, you will need to just set up a few details relating to your portal.

Here you enter some information about how you want to brand and configure the service.
You must give a name and also select a domain for your portal. By selecting a domain, it will be possible to share advertisements with other portals in the same domain, without being confused by irrelevant categories in other domains. If none of the options listed are suitable, you may create a new domain.

You may also enter

• the URL for a small logo image
• a URL that someone will link to when they click on that image (if you want to set up a return link)
• a preferred highlight colour - so that you can retain some visual consistency with your own site.

Ask yourself the following questions:

1. What items will users want to advertise - what catgories do you want to support ?
2. For each category, are there specific features or properties that should be entered as separate fields - e.g to allow searching. Do any of these have a finite set of allowed values (e.g. Manufacturer)?
3. Do you want to support "Wanted" advertisements as well as "For Sale" ?
4. Do you want to restrict access to your own user-base or are you prepared to share the category with others ? - if the latter you may want to see whether a suitable category already exists.
5. Will you always link to all of your categories together, or do you want to consider splitting them up into groups? (this will affect the way you use the Tag field later on)

Check whether there are already any existing published categories that you may want to subscribe to. The chances are they will already have some relevant content that may be of interest to your users.

Now click on the Administer link on your home page to go to the administration page. Under Templates you can click on Subscribe to Published Templates

You can choose to subscribe to one or more of these - tick the Subscribe box and enter a value in the TAG field (Hint: unless you want to set up different groups of categories then always use the same Tag value)

If you still want to create your own template, then now is the time to do so. Click on the Edit the Templates link on your home page to go to the Template Administration page.

• Give the template a name that will be meaningful to your users
• Enter a description - especially if you are willing to publish to other communities
• Decide whether to link to a region (country) - only worthwhile if you expect to have international users.
• Enter a Tag: By entering a value here, you will be able to provide a view of this site that only includes the templates with a given Tag.
• Decide whether to publish to other groups
• Finally, enter the lifetime (in days) that you want adverts to be displayed for.

Finally, you need to insert a hyperlink from your site into the advertising pages. You may do this as a straightforward link, in a new window, or possibly in a sub-frame. The URL that you need to call contains some parameters to identify your portal, give some heading text, and provide a TAG parameter if you are showing only a sub-set of your categories on this link. For full help, click on the URL and parameters link on your home page to go to the URL parameters page.