Event Portal Site

Each account has its own auto-generated portal site that lists all of the events in that account and has the option to be available publicly online. This help doc will describe how to configure and use the portal site.

How the portal site works

The event portal site is provided for the convenience of our users who wish to have one central area that aggregates all of your events on Corsizio and can be easily shared with your audience or even used as your events website. It allows your audience to quickly get an overview of all of your current and upcoming events and register for any of them. People can filter on those events based on categories, location, price, and other filters that you configure and enable them to find what they need. If you enable access to it, the portal site will be public and searchable on major search engines. It is generated with SEO and mobile-friendly technology. While this portal site is auto-generated for each account by default, it is up to you if you use it by sharing it and linking to it.

If you are satisfied with using only your own website and providing links directly to your events and registration forms or embedding event widgets on it, you may wish not to use the portal site at all. This approach may be desirable if you have a small number of events or infrequent events.

On the other hand, you may want to rely on the portal site as the main aggregator of your events and predominantly send your audience to it. This approach is most desirable if you have a large number of events or if you do not have your own website. Read the section How to share the portal site below to learn about the best sharing options.

Keep in mind that while certain features of the portal site are configurable, it is not meant to serve as a fully customizable solution. If you have advanced requirements, then keep all of the event information on your website and just link directly to the event registration forms. This allows you to achieve whatever layout, design, and branding that you may desire, right on your own website. Corsizio also provides a Developer API that can help programmatically to get access to your event information.

Here is a general example of what the portal site looks like:

Portal site web address

Each portal site is provided with its own unique web address. You have the option to customize this web address to match your brand and make it shorter, as follows:

Go to the account Settings, and select Account Profile.
Fill in the Sub-domain / Alias to enter a custom web address of your choice. It is recommended to use your business name. The current public web address will be displayed for your reference in this section.
Be sure to Save account profile before leaving this area.

Note: You can change the name of your custom sub-domain at a later date, and choose another one if it is available. However, keep in mind that this may interfere with your marketing and registrations if you have already shared the previous web address publicly and did not make arrangements to re-direct it appropriately.

How to configure and customize the portal site

You have several settings and options that allow you to customize the auto-generated portal site. To configure these options, go to the account Settings, then select Configurations, and then Portal Site from the left side menu. Go through each section to configure your portal site, as follows below.

Enable the Portal Site

Check the box "Enable the auto-generated portal site to show all current and upcoming events" if you would like the account's portal site to be accessible on the Internet.

When the portal site is enabled, every event page also links back to the portal site via your brand header so that potential attendees can see other events that you have available. This should be enabled in most cases.
When the portal site is disabled, it does not exist publicly and the header link back to it from each event is disabled. However, any event that you have with a status of "published" still exists publicly online, independent of the portal site. The event portal site and online searchability of your individual events are completely independent of each other. For more information about this, please read the help doc Event discoverability on search engines.

Branding Options

Choose whether you'd like your account name or an uploaded logo image to be displayed on the header of your portal site. If you are using a logo image, for best display results, the image should be horizontally rectangular with a height of around 120px (the width will adjust accordingly). The image file must be a JPG, PNG, or GIF, and be under 5MB. An ideal image would be a PNG file with a transparent background to blend in properly with the header.

Theme & Color Options

Choose a color theme from the dropdown list or provide your own hexadecimal color codes for the site header background and header navigation text.

Event List Layout Options

You can configure and override any of these available layout options:

Override the initial view flow of events on the generated portal, and select your preferred flow from the dropdown list. This is helpful to use when you normally have a large number of upcoming events, and you want users to filter the list before they see any events.
Override the default order of the events on the generated portal, and select your preferred order from the dropdown list. This is helpful when you want to change the default sort order of the event list.
Override the default grouping of the events on the generated portal, and select your preferred grouping from the dropdown list. This is helpful when you have a large number of upcoming events, and you want to group them on the screen with some distinctive headings.
Limit the items for paging the events listed on the generated portal, and select your preferred paging limit from the dropdown list. This is helpful when you have a very large number of upcoming events, and you want the user to page through them instead of listing them all at once.

Component Display Options

You can enable or disable any of these available display options:

Hide the filtration toolbar on the generated portal. This is helpful when you normally have a small number of upcoming events, and you don't want any filters used.
Hide social icons on all generated pages. This is helpful when your events are for a closed community, and you don't need the online social sharing, or you just want to remove them.
Show calendar view in the open state by default on the generated portal. This is helpful when a quick calendar view presents your events better. Users can still show/hide the calendar view as desired.
Remove the calendar view option completely on the generated portal. This is helpful to disable if events laid out in a calendar view are confusing due to their complexity, or for any other reason that you may have.
Show some recent past events on the generated portal. This is helpful when you only have a very small number of recent events, which you want your audience to see even if they have ended. This will show recent events in the list and the calendar view of the present or past month, depending on the current day. Caution: If you have many recently past events, this may clutter your portal site with too many old events.
Hide events that have already started, rather than waiting until they end, from the generated portal. This is helpful when you have a large number of events that span many days and you want to automatically hide them the moment they reach their start time to reduce clutter in the list.
Hide events that are full or sold-out from the generated portal. This is helpful when you have a large number of events and you usually don't need the full or sold-out events to show up on the generated portal to reduce clutter in the list. This will not hide full events that have their waiting list feature enabled.
Hide all cover photos on the list of events. This is helpful when you want to prevent showing cover images for each event within the list and gain more space for text instead. Note that they are automatically hidden if no images are present for any item in the list.
Allow users on the portal site to filter by instructors. This will show the list of instructors as part of the filters toolbar. It is helpful to enable this if you want to expose the names of all of the account instructors publicly.

Price Display Options

Hide any free ($0) pricing labels on generated pages. This is helpful when you only offer free events, and you don't want the pricing label to show in public listings.
Hide all prices on the portal list view. This is helpful when you don't want to show the prices on the public event list view, but only on the other generated pages.
Hide all prices on all generated portal pages. This is helpful when you don't want to show any prices on the public event list view and other generated pages, except on the form during registration.
Include any taxes in the display price labels on generated pages. This is helpful when your customers expect the taxes to be included in the displayed price. This is expected in some regions.

Public Feedback List

Show the most recent list of published feedback on public pages. This is helpful when you have gathered automated feedback from attendees, and you published some of them to show on the portal site.

Extra Navigation Links

You can add custom links to the top navigation menu on the portal site or to the "Thank You" screen shown after the registration form is submitted. This will allow your customers to navigate to an external location if they choose to, like your business website or social media page. It is recommended to have a maximum of only 3 links per target placement so that these areas are not overwhelmed by links and have appropriate space.

Top and Bottom Message Bar Text

You can include a short message in the top-bar (just below the header) on the portal site. This is helpful when you would like to provide a welcome message or any general information about your event list. The text can be formatted and stylized using the rich-text Editor or using Markdown formatting and basic HTML in Code view.
You can include a short message in the bottom-bar (just above the footer) on the portal site. This is helpful when you would like to provide a policy or terms and conditions message with an optional link to another webpage or emphasize any other applicable information. The text can be formatted and stylized using the rich-text Editor or using Markdown formatting and basic HTML in Code view.

Be sure to Save site setup before you leave this configuration area and before you attempt to open and view the portal site to see the results of your configurations.

Note: If you desire to give more abilities to your audience to filter your events effectively, then be sure to visit some of the other areas under Configurations, namely Locations, Categories, Age Groups, Genders, Price Ranges, and Levels. It is not essential to configure these areas, but they will help you and your customers to organize your events better.

To share your portal site with your audience so that they can find, view, and register for your events, you have the following two options:

Share by link

It is best practice to share your portal site using the link method. The link you use to share your portal site would likely be the custom web address that you have configured for it, as explained above or just the web address Corsizio has generated for you. Sharing your portal site using its web URL link provides you with the easiest and most efficient way of sharing it on your website, on social media, via email, and even on print materials.

In addition to sharing the link to the entire portal site, you can filter on categories, locations, price, age groups, and gender on your portal site and share links directly to the filtered list in the same way.

Share by embedding

If you need to embed the portal site directly inside your website, then near the top and bottom of your Portal Site Configurations page, you will find an Embed Code option.

When you click on the Embed Code, you will be presented with a popup window that will present you with more configuration options to choose from and filter on depending on how you want your portal site embed to appear. For advanced documentation and parameters read the help doc HTML embed of the account portal site.

The embed option is generally less desirable for a number of reasons:

First, if you are using a CMS or website builder, these have different limitations that can prevent or interfere with the portal site displaying properly.
Second, when the portal site is embedded, its mobile effectiveness is diminished.
Third, when the portal site is embedded, there may be security concerns if your site is not using SSL encryption because your audience won't see Corsizio's security lock on their browser address bar during registration.

This is why it is best practice to use the previous method and provide a link on your website directly to the portal site. However, if the above points are not an issue in your case, then embedding the portal site can be a good option.