Setting up your Workplace public site

Principal Workplace comes with many apps pre-installed. Many of these apps are free, while some come at monthly subscription fee. However, the Branding app is one of those that are not free, as it charges 5 US$ monthly, some of its features remain free even if the Branding app subscription expires.

Editing a multi page Public Site and Blog, are two features that will remain always there as long as you have your Principal Workplace subscription active, this includes Workplace free tier.

Public Site and Blog are a quick and simple way to establish your company's digital presence. These can be satisfactory to your business needs for a while if all you need is the simple built in easy to use site builder. If you already have a corporate web site, or decided to go for the stunning corporate portal, done by your designer of choice and hosted on your own hosting space, your Workplace Public Site will remain the gateway linking between your internal workflows and your public audience.

When you sign up for your Principal Workplace account, a subdomain is automatically created for you, it is going to be [https://company-name.principal-wp.com]. If you already have a domain, you can ask your DNS administrator to create an alias for a subdomain under your own domain.

For example let's say your company's name is acme.com, and you have signed up to Principal Workplace providing the company domain as "acme", accordingly you will have your Workplace subdomain created as acme.principal-wp.com. It might look lenghly to you, or you may think you want everybody to see everything under your own domain, in this case you can ask your DNS administrator to create a new alias (CANME record), let's say Workplace.Acme.com, which maps internally to acme.principal-wp.com.

We are focusing here particularly on the always free features of the Branding app. To make use of both the Blog, and the Public site, following are the practical steps:

1. Accessing you Blog App:

Blog app is a Free independent app, installed by default, with access allowed to the Account Admin. To allow other users to create new posts and edit posts, these users need to be assigned "Blogger" role.

To be able to edit the blog, you need to first log in then select the "Public Site" link from the preferences menu at top riht of the Workplace Menu. Only Account Admin, or members of the "Blogger" role will be able to see the links to add a new post, or edit a particular post.

2. Editing your site pages:

Only Account owner can access the Branding app. To access the Workplace Public Site pages, click on 'Public Site' on the side-menu, click the plus sign '+' to add new page or click edit to edit existing page.

The zero code page builder will offer you a way to quickly build a clean and consistent look pages. If your business care for logo placement and standard color theme, you will have to go for the other non-free features of Logo white labeling and theme selection, to get things as close as possible to your corporate standards.

3. Pages special controls:

In the page builder control set there are three special controls:

• Webinar session registration control, which allows public audience to register for planned webinars,
• Careers control, which lists your Job posts and can start the Job application process,
• Workflows, where your public forms show up, this can be a feedback form, and admission form, a or any form you may have designed and linked to a work flow which is intended for your public audience to use.

More on setting up your Logo and theme is on this post