The Watkins e-Associate Home page serves as the entryway for you, your customers, your prospects, and your downline Associates to WatkinsOnline.com. You can customize what visitors to your home page see by changing the settings and adding content in the My Web Site section of the My Account area.
You have the option of adding a photo to the Watkins banner on the top of the page, adding a page title on the Watkins banner, adding a Headline for your page, and of displaying or hiding Watkins corporate home page content. You can also post up to 5 stories for your visitors to read and an additional 5 stories that only your downline Associates can access.
The page title appears in the Watkins banner that spans the top of the page. It appears just to the right of your photo (if you choose to post a photo). The default is your name as it appears in our records with your ID number below it.
To change your title click "Update" next to "Page Title" on the My Web site administration page. Enter your new title or message and click the "update" button. Note that your ID number will continue to appear regardless of your message.
Your personalized photo, if you choose to include one, will appear on the banner that spans the top of the page. You can use either a jpeg image or a gif image, but the image size must be 72 pixels wide by 77 pixels tall.
To add or change your picture, click "Update" next to "Personalized Photo" on the My Web site administration page. Either enter the location of the picture on your computer or use the "browse" button to navigate to your picture. When you have located the picture click on the "submit" button and the image will be copied to the server. The current image will preview on the administration page underneath "Personalized Photo."
A note about sizing photos: If your picture is not sized to 72 x 77 pixels it will display at 72 x 77, badly distorting the image in the process. To have good results with your photo, it is best to crop and resize the photo before adding it to your site. This requires the use of photo editing software. This software can range from very expensive professional design software to home versions that often come bundled with a scanner or digital camera. If this all sounds greek to you, this may be a good time to ask a digital camera-toting friend for help.
The Stories Headline appears just under the Watkins Banner (or just under the corporate home page display) and remains visible while visitors are reading your stories.
To add or change the Headline, click "Update" next to "Stories Headline" on the My Web site administration page. Enter your Headline and click the "update" button. The current Headline previews on the administration page underneath "Stories Headline."
This is where you add and maintain the main content of your stories on your home page. Besides adding content, you can select who will be able to see the story and which stories will serve as the lead stories.
To add a story, click on "Edit" next to "Personalized Stories" on the my Web site administration page. On the following page click on "Create." This brings up the main edit story page. The top of the page offers the following options for the story you are about to create:
By Line. Place the author of the story's name here. It will appear just below the Story Headline after the word "by:" and will be followed by the date the story is published. It can be left blank.
Story Headline. Appears in bold letters at the top of the story. It will also serve as a link to the story when it is not the lead or active story.
Introduction. Appears below the heading when the story is not the lead or active story. Gives a brief teaser for the story.
Story. The main body of the story can be entered into this box. Text can either be typed directly in the box or pasted in from an outside text editor (Windows users use "ctrl + v" to paste, Mac users use apple + v). Your options for formatting the text depend somewhat on the operating system and the browser you are using:
While the embedded editing software available to Internet Explorer users on the PC can be helpful in formatting text documents, the editor is still utilizing HTML tags. To gain full control of your formatting you will want to learn how to use and edit the tags. The HTML help provided here is just a start; there are free tutorials on the Web and a large number of books and other resources available on HTML.
When working with HTML text, it's best to use a simple text editor such as Notepad or Simple Text rather than word processors, which can add unwanted characters. A simple HTML editor can make HTML editing much more convenient. There are many free HTML editors available for download. A good place to find a listing of available editors is cnet.com. Search for "HTML editors."
Note: The story administration inserts your page contents within a larger page (which has the WatkinsOnline.com navigation and branding). This means that you don't have to worry about page level HTML tags.
Click on "Save" when you are finished or if you wish to preview your work. Review the information on the subsequent page. Click "OK" to return to the my Web site page, "edit" to return to the story editing page, or preview to view the story as it will look to your visitors. You can return to make changes to your story at any time from the Personalized Story admin page.
Home Page Settings. This setting allows you to display the information from the corporate home page on your home page. If you choose to show the corporate text and images, your personalized stories will start below the corporate text. If you choose to hide the corporate text, your stories will display just below the page banner.
You can create hypertext links to other pages within your stories, within WatkinsOnline.com, or anywhere else on the web. To create a link, you will have to know the URL address of the page you are linking to. This is easy for a home page (http://www.google.com for instance). For pages with more elaborate addresses, copy the address directly from the tool bar. For example, this address is from a page inside our Business Opportunity Section that you might want to refer prospect to: http://www.watkinsonline.com/businessOpportunity/default.cfm?main=AB60C40C-8103-11D5-848D00A0C9AF111D
Note: you can't link to pages that are password protected or are located after a login such as pages within Watkins Business Bulletin.
A link has two parts, the address of the linked page which is embedded in the tag, and the link text which is the what the page visitor sees and clicks on. So for the very complicated address above, you might use a link text such as "Learn more about our Income Opportunity." See "Need HTML Help?" for the tags and formatting of hyperlinks.
Unlike a word processor that allows you to "insert" an image, HTML documents don't hold the image; they simply hold the address of where the image is stored along with other information about how the image should be displayed. So to get an image to display on a web page two things must happen: the image must be stored on a server, and the correct address pointing to that address must be in your text. See "Need HTML Help?" for the formatting of image tags.
The only picture that you can store on WatkinsOnline is the image that you can upload in the Personalized Photo section, so if you want to add additional images to your e-Associate pages, you will have to find space on the web to store them. Many Internet service providers offer web space free or at a nominal cost to subscribers.
Web images must be in a jpg or gif format. Because the viewer has to download each image, it is a good idea to keep the image files relatively small to reduce download time. One way to do this is by reducing the dimensions of the image. Additionally, adjusting the resolution of the image can reduce file size. An image viewed on a monitor needs a lot less information to look clean and sharp than that same image sent to a color printer. Many photo editing software programs have special features for optimizing photos for the web, which help reduce the file size while maintaining sharp images.