Getting Started with the SmartSpace Social Page

So you’ve just bought SmartSpace and you’re wondering how to get started building your online presence.  This article aims to give you a couple of tips to quickly customize your Social Page, the one-page instant website that is automatically set up for you when you bought SmartSpace for your domain name.

First things first.  How do you get to the SmartSpace admin control panel?

There are two ways to get there.  The first way is to access it from My Products once you have logged in to your account (you’ll find it under Domains in the left side bar).  You can also navigate directly to it via the start subdomain of the domain you just purchased.  Did I just lose you there?  Sorry about that.  Think of it this way.  If you were to buy the domain coolexample.com and add SmartSpace, Go Daddy automatically creates a subdomain, start.coolexample.com, so you can directly access SmartSpace just by typing that in a Web browser.  When you get to this login page, just enter the user name and password of your SmartSpace shopper account.

Now that you’ve logged in, you’re probably wondering how to edit your Social Page.

You’ll see the Site Building Space has links to let you access your Web presence building tools – Social Page, Blog, Photos, Website.  Click Customize my Social Page.

Okay you’re there, now what’s all this stuff on your page?

Go Daddy sets up a pre-built site when you purchase SmartSpace to give you a starting point with some ideas of what you can do with your Social Page.  The boxes are little containers of information.  To get rid of these containers simply click the X in the top right corner of the container.  Now you can put your own stuff on the page.

To add content to the page, click Add Content in the yellow toolbar near the top of the page.  This opens up a menu displaying the different types of content you can add to the page.  The two types we’ll go for are RSS feeds and website links (there are plenty of other widgets available, but we’ll concentrate on these two first).

The menu is pre-populated with a few RSS feeds to get you started.  If you have your own favorite feeds from other sites, clicking Blank RSS is the way to go.  Clicking this link opens a new container in the middle of the page with two tabs: Setup and Settings.  In the Setup tab, you can change the title of the container ,and you can paste in the URL of your RSS feed.  Click OK and you’re done.  You have a new feed that displays in that container on your site.  The last thing to do is to move this container to where you want it to display on your site (position the mouse over the container title, and then click and drag).

To add website links, hover over Extras in the Add Content menu, then click My Favorites in the sub-menu fly-out.  This container displays in the middle of the page (as do all new containers!) and you’ll see two columns  – one for URL and one for Display Name.  You can put as many URLs as you want in the list.  You can also have as many containers on the page as you want, so you can have different containers for different categories of links — think of this as sharing your favorite bookmarks with your social circle.

Great, I’ve now got my stuff on the page.  How do I customize the look and feel?

There are 2 easy things that you can do to give your site a bit of your own flair.  Click Change Background in the yellow toolbar and you’ll see two tabs.  The first one gives you a color picker where you can choose a different background color.  The second one allows you to change the background image.  This is a good option if you have an online photo album with a cool photo that you want to use as the background of your page.  All you have to do is copy the URL of that image from your album and paste it into the section that says Link to URL.  Click OK, and you have a new personalized background.

To make all these changes appear on your site, simply click on the Publish link in the toolbar.

Congratulations, you are well on your way to customizing your Social Page.