Membership set up

[justine22]

Hello all, wondering if anyone can help me. I want to set up a site where people become members and pay a small fee to view further information. In other words I give them a brief description of a 'article' or 'book' and they can gain access to the full content by registering as a member and paying a small fee. They can then freely download any information they want from the site.

Q1 How do I set up the secure area where they must login to gain access? where would the files be stored when I setup the hosting?

Q2 How do you set up the login area and the facility for their login to gain access to the information?

Q3 What's the best method (cheapest) of them paying their membership fee and where can I get the software to do that?

Any help with this would be much appreciated. I may seem a bit naive but i've only so far done informative websites never anything which would involve 'shopping' or a members area.

Sorry forgot to mention this is all to be done on Xara Web Designer.

Thanks

[gwpriester]

Welcome to the Xtreme Conference.

You would need some means of creating a password protected portion of your website. Sometimes this is something your web host can help you with. I do my web hosting with Network Solutions and they have a module already in place for creating a password protected area.

There are many options for collecting money, the easiest is PayPal and it would be perfect for what you are doing. You generate the code on the PayPal site then use a Placeholder in Web Designer or Xtreme 5 to link to the shopping cart, buttons, etc.

Here's a link for adding PayPal to your site.

[w00dy]

A couple more options are:

http://www.phpjabbers.com/member-login/

http://www.coffeecup.com/website-access-manager/

The Coffee Cup solution is external to your Xara, so it does not require use of placeholders and you can import a list of pre-defined username/passwords, created in Excel or whatever, so all you have to do is assign one to a new user.

I'd go with Gary with a Paypal solution for collecting the membership fees.

[justine22]

Thank you so much for responding. The information you have both provided is fab I will set everything up tonight.

Thanks again