Websites in Publisher

In the Copernica Publisher it is made easy to create and host your own webpage using HTML. You can use these pages to inform your customers or place webforms and surveys to get to know your customers. You can use a template for your website and edit the source code with ease. It's also possible to use personalization (only) if your users are logged in. We will explain how to automatically log users in through your emails later in this article.

You can also link the website to a subdomain of your own website. This prevents users from seeing your website is hosted by Copernica and makes it look more trustworthy and professional in general.

NOTE: Building a website with Copernica required HTML knowledge. If you do not have HTML knowledge you may use our default template, import one from the internet or let a Copernica partner create one for you.

Article contents:

Getting started

You can find the Websites button in the Publisher menu. From here you can create a website with several webpages. We distinguish between the two: Webpages are similar to email documents and use their own templates. The website is the collective of webpages.

The template is the blueprint of your website that determines what it should look like and how it should be structured. Since it only determines the style and structure you can use such a template for the whole website to give it a uniform look, but it's also possible to use multiple templates for your website. After creating a template you can start adding content such as text, image and loop blocks to create the webpage. They can also be personalized.

Some important points:

  • A website contains webpages, which are like documents.
  • Pages can be based on the same or different templates.
  • The website only becomes available online after linking to a domain or subdomain.
  • It is possible to have multiple domains for one website, but not multiple websites for one domain.
  • Only websites with a valid domain are billed. You can check your license information for prices.
  • Surveys and webforms made in Copernica only work on Copernica hosted pages.

Creating pages

First you have to create a new template and a new website in the Websites menu. You will edit the HTML source code to create the template for the webpage. There are several types of content blocks that you should add to the template such that you can fill them in later. The table below shows examples on how to use the blocks. Be sure to consider the ratio between text and images, as it may affect your spam score.

Content block Example Use
Text [text name="TEXTBLOCKNAME"] Add textual content to your webpage
Image [image name="IMAGEBLOCKNAME"] Add images to your email
Loop [loop name="LOOPNAME"]code to repeat[/loop] Repeat image, text and other loop blocks
Survey {survey name="name of the survey"} Include survey made under Content
Webform {webform name="name of the form"} Include webform made under Content

Media is managed under the Media Library in Content. You can use images from the media library with <img src="image.png">.

The loop block is very useful when you don't know how many images you will use, or if not every webpage uses the same amount of images. You may then choose how many images to use while creating the webpage without changing the HTML.

You can also add a survey or webform by using the Include special content function in the screen to edit the contents of a text block. This will replace the text block with a survey or webform block.

When you have created the template you can simply create a webpage and edit its content.

Linking a domain

Your website will only be available and billed if it is linked to a valid domain. You can choose to link to www.yourdomain.com or a subdomain like www.surveys.yourdomain.com. Which one you choose depends on your needs: If you just want a small website hosted by us you can choose to host on your main domain. If you just want to use Copernica websites to handle surveys, for example, it is better to make a separate subdomain for this.

How to set up the domain:

  1. Create a new subdomain in the DNS* of your website domain.
  2. Make a CNAME record pointing to publisher.copernica.com to refer to our hosted version of your website. (See Google CNAME help)
  3. Link the subdomain in Copernica via Domains in the website menu.

Clever hyperlinks can help you and your customer. Adding login codes to the hyperlink in your email gives you the profile information, which has quite a few advantages:

  • Webforms can be pre-filled with profile data
  • Surveys results can be linked automatically
  • Personalization with profile data
  • Users don't need to log in

You can prepare the hyperlink with the function Prepare hyperlinks under Document in the E-mailings menu, or add the following code to your hyperlink:

http://subdomain.yourdomain.nl/namewebpage**?profile={$profile.id}&code={$profile.code}**

Please remember to replace profile by subprofile if you are emailing subprofiles instead.

Set default pages

There are a few default pages that are useful for your website to have. You can configure them under Default pages in the website menu.

  • Home page: Where the user is sent if they have not entered a specific webpage.
  • Error page: Where the user is sent if they are sent to a non-existing page.
  • Login page: The page that is displayed when a user needs to login to continue. Place a login form here.

Restricting access

The login page is shown when a user has no access to the current page. You can set the access for pages in the website menu. In the same menu you can also (temporarily) deactivate a webpage.

More information