Step by Step Guide for Ad-Din Public Facing Website (PFW) Offering
How to Activate, Configure and Populate your Public Facing Website (PFW) from Ad-Din Solutions.
Estimated time to complete: 2-4 Hours
Difficulty: Easy
Prerequisites:
Masjid / Madrasah account is approved.
Masjid / Madrasah Admin rights.
PFW Package Includes:
Ready to go website, just start populating.
Hosting
Subdomain
SSL
Support
Introduction
Ad-Din offers Website & Mobile App for Masjid or Madrasah or both combined In No Time
In a user-centric world Mobile App and Websites are an essential part of an organization so others can get to know more about the organization and stay engaged. Most of our Masajid are struggling to maintain a quality website that conveys the right information.
At Ad-Din we've challenge that and have automated many traditional ways of posting contents to the websites & Mobile App by one discretely.
With Ad-Din PFW (Public Facing Website), any Masjid and/or Madrasah can easily launch and maintain a high-quality website & Mobile App that's,
Fully integrated to Ad-Din's Madrasah/School & Masjid Management solution
Beautifully designed
Automatic and rich in information
Consistent
Secured
Latest-and-greatest cloud based technology behind the scene
Runs of the robust hosting platform such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon web services
With Ad-Din, not only Masajid and/or Madaaris get a quality website, but also high-quality Mobile Apps for both iOS and Android Phone and Tablets, that helps the Masajid and/or Madaaris and the communities be in touch with each other from wherever they are
With Ad-Din, Masajid can focus only on the content and leave the technicalities on us, such as hosting, server, database, reporting, coding/programming, network, scaling, security, Storage, Bandwidth & Software updates etc.
Many a time Masajid and Madaaris Management staff are not technical and depends on volunteers or experts to help with technology, and in the vast majority of cases Masajid or Madaaris don't have much technical expertise to maintain a quality website or Mobile App and structure the data in more precise manner which results in lots of administrative burdens, dependencies and lack of reporting in the long run. Any generic CMS platforms such as WordPress to run your Masjid websites, require a lot of technical know-how to setup a quality website, and second, they all require constant updates and security patches to keep them up-to-date. In majority of cases, that leads to a website that's displeasing in terms of quality and vulnerable.
At Ad-Din we are trying to resolve this and its only possible with your support ,we've exceled in this area to help our beloved Masajid and Madaaris to easily and effectively maintain a quality online presence for best outreach
In this day and age, a quality website, that's fully functional, is not only a reflection of the Masjid but also a reflection of the community that supports the Masjid and Madrasah/Religious School. Many of us know the fact the University and Schools leveraging the technology to ease their day to administration and keeping everyone in the know with powerful IT medium why can't our Masaajid and Madaaris!
Not only the Islamic community deserves a quality website, but also the community we live amongst seeks out information in real time conveniently. And also, reaching out to the community via mobile app make every effort at the Masjid and Madrasah much more efficient.
Now that we have some background on what Ad-Din has to offer with PFW lets setup your organizations website.
In order to further setup your Masjid and/or Madrasah Website here are some key things to keep it handy
Remember Good Content and Nice Images are what makes the site stand out.
Build a good images library, you can download these zip files of images we compiled for you to get started, these are already optimized for smaller size and better look use them as is.
PFW SAMPLE Banner Images (temporary till you have your own banner image)
Download Image compression tool to reduce the image size for faster load time.
For PNG file optimization click here to download this software to reduce the file size, simply download unzip and drag and drop the png file you want to reduce the file size on the batch file. Will throw a highly compressed image for a website.
Here are few others.
Ad-Din PFW Needs images in the following image sizes by content
News Image Size: Min Width – 1080px Wide X 322px High
News Image Recommended Size: ≤150kb
Events Images Size: Min Width – 540px Wide X 322px High
New Image Recommended Size: ≤150kb
Banner Image Recommended Size: ≥ 1920px Wide X 600px High
Banner Image Recommended Size: ≤ 300kb
Picture Gallery Sizes: Recommended 1000px Wide X (Any Height)
Download this image resizer
Click here to download this tool to resize the image, use it with advanced option, only resize the Width leave the height as is unless otherwise needed.
For taking the snapshot of the screen you can use built in windows snipping tool or click here to download this one.
Ok so let's get started.
Activating Public Facing Website (PFW)
Activating PFW for your organization with your Ad-Din's Admin account is one click away. Depending on what you want to use activate either Masjid and/or Madrasah website.
Merging/Unmerging Masjid & Madrasah Website
You can simply merge the Masjid and Madrasah website to make it look like a single website.
If you have one Public facing subscription you can run both Masjid and Madrasah site merged without needing another subscription.
If you want to run them separated than two separate subscriptions are required, i.e. one for Masjid and one for Madrasah .
Now to merge the two sites simply click on Home on Website from Left Menu. And ensure the Masjid is selected, than click on Manage Organizations, notice only one box with Masjid details showing up prior to merging.
Click on Link a Madrasah, Select the Madrasah you will only see the one you are administrator of.
Review the details and click on accept and request.
You will get this prompt
X out of the popup box now and switch the organization to Madrasah now from top right corner.
You should see this message
Click on Manage Organization and Click on Accept.
Click on Accept and Link
You should now see two organization linked togather, now the content of both will appear on a same page.
You are done merging the two website. The URL will remain of the Masjid, if the request came from Madrasah than the Madrasah URL will supersede.
To detach the site Simply click on Manage Organization and click on Unlink the Merged Organization. And the two sites will be independent again keeping the content intact.
Purchasing PFW Subscription to Release the Public Facing Website (PFW)
Next is to purchase the full subscription for site to be released for public viewing.
You will need to enter your credit card details of if paying by invoice/Check update the payment method first. In case of organization assigned subscription you may not need to update anything here. Please speak to Ad-Din support if unsure.
Secondly you will need one or two administrators Yearly or Monthly subscription to manage the website so increase the yearly subscription count by number of Administrators needed. This will in turn generate the invoice and will be charged to the payment method selected.
Than click on Subscribe now on Ad-Din Public Facing Webpages (PFW) and this will generate second invoice and will be charged to the method selected.
Once the subscription payment is cleared the site will become active for public viewing.
Populate your Organizations basic information
From the Menu click on Website and select Masjid or Madrasah Website and being to fill the basic details of your organization
Enter 1-3 emails address, these email address will be notified of any enquiry submitted from the web portal contact us page.
Choose your site Subdomain shorter the better to easily remember
Setup accurate prayer times
Prayer times are crucial component and must be accurately populated regularly. You can follow below knowledge base articles to configure prayer times for your website.
Fill the Live Streaming channel embed codes
Ad-Din offer YouTube and Mixlr channels embedding. Grab your channels embed code and follow below guide to enter them on Ad-Din.
To paste the embed code simply go to Live Streaming from the Left Menu and click on edit icon paste the embed code and you are done. The live channel will now be available from both mobile and web.
Creating the Service Pages for Masjid & Madrasah
Marriage Service, Funeral Services, Donations, Madrasah Policy, Admission requirements, parking info etc are considered a "Service Pages". You can create the relevant service pages from either Masjid or Madrasah. Once the Service pages are added they will appear on the Web as well as the Mobile app to users who has set your organization as the home Masjid or Home Madrasah.
To create the free flow Service page, is quite simple. Once navigated to Introduction & Services click on
Simple fill the content of choice and click on Publish and the Service page is now listed on mobile and will be available on Web as well can be linked the menu item.
There are no limit of number of service pages but keeping them light and concise will get the best and faster user experience.
All the service pages combined for masjid and madrasah can be displayed as a list using a built in list pages available from the Menu settings.
Build the Menu for your site
You can build three level menu for your website. Ad-Din offers 8 fixed listing pages, unlimited external links & unlimited service pages all can have links in menu item. Building Menu is quite self explanatory.
You can link the contents with three choices
Menu Name to > Service Page
Menu Name to > External Page
Menu Name to > Internal (service) Page
Linking a menu item to Listing page.
Setup the Donations Page & Logo for your organization
One of the Masjid or Madrasah Service page can be setup as the donation page. All you need is your payment gateway URL or an embed code for donations which can be hyperlinked in this service page.
If you have embed code you would want to switch the editor to code view and paste the donation gateway embed code at the end of the line. Than click back on the code view for page to render. Do your alignments and publish the page.
Next is from the left menu go to Settings > Organization > Organization Management > Choose your Masjid or Madrasah and select the Donation page and Save it twice.
You have successfully setup the donation page, this page will now appear in both the mobile and on web as the button. Upon clicking on the link it will take users to the donation gateway.
Upload your organizations logo at least 300px High.
Important Contents Publishing
Below are the different content type that changes quite often and will automatically get populated on your organizations public facing website, and are quite easy to add.
Masjid/Madrasah News
Adding a news to the PFW and/or notifying of that news via push notification and email is a simple task.
Go to Messages from the left navigation menu in portal.ad-din.ca or from mobile app tap on Messages. You must be administrator of the organization to compose the new message.
Compose a new message and select the organization you wish to publish the News for i.e. Masjid or Madrasah. Than fill the message content, pick a good image for news and select the target to notify via email and/or push notification. If you don't want to notify simply leave the targets unchecked, just select the "Send as News" and the message will be posted on the website real-time.
Ad-Din Mobile app has the same flow just on a mobile interface.
To delete the News of the Ad-Din PFW simply delete the news from the News section
Masjid/Madrasah Events
Adding Masjid and/or Madrasah events are another self explanatory and simple tasks from either web portal or Ad-Din's Mobile App.
You can create Event from either Web portal.ad-din.ca or Ad-Din Mobile App
From Web Portal simply click on Events from the left menu and click on "Add-New Event"
Fill in all the event details, pick a decent picture for the event and Save & Publish.
Picture Gallery
Picture Gallery can be published from the Mobile only at present using Ad-Din's Mobile App.
Take some good snaps/pictures of the organization and its facilities and resize them to a smaller size and (preferably 800px Wide, Hight can be any)
From Mobile App Go to Masjid > Admin Portal > Gallery > tap on + icon on top right corner, select one by one and enter the picture details to upload it. These images will now appear on mobile and on web as well.
Madrasah Programs Details
Publishing Madrasah Prorgrams brief summary is a good way to keep your users in the know.
Here is how you will enter the details about the Madrasah programs from Ad-Din's Web portal.ad-din.ca
Select the Program/Class, If you don't have the Class you can add one from the Madrasah > Admin Portal > Class > Add, than come back to Program Details and Subjects.
Select the program and click on Play button.
You should get the + Add button click on it and enter the program details
After Adding the Program Details you will end up on this page, if you have more program details to be populated than click again on the "Program Details and subjects" and repeat above two steps again.
Students/Teachers Recognition
Recognition are automatically read of the Ad-Din Madrasah portal and displayed on the Web portal.
Recognition are added based on the performance of Student or Teachers. So just to populate the website don't add any recognition.
For Recognition to be created whole Madrasah system must be fully on-boarded with active subscriptions. More details on on-boarding Madrasah module can be learned at https://ad-din.thinkific.com.
Setting up domain redirection:
This guide to setup your domain is crafted around the Domain Registrar "http://Netfirms.com "
Every organization tend to have their primary domain for example alarqam.ca or slifo.ca or maltonmasjid.ca
In this section of the guide I will explain how you can have your primary domain redirected to website offered from Ad-Din we call it PFW (Public Facing Website)
Primary Domain Redirection to Ad-Din:
Here are the steps:
Login to Portal.ad-din.ca
Click on Website from the mega menu on left then click on settings.
Capture the URL: for example here it is https://alarqam.ad-din.site
Now login to your domain registrar for example https://netfirms.com and on the home page under summary
Make sure the LetsEncrypt Free SSL is turned on
Make sure the Enforce SSL is turned on
Now click on Pointers & Subdomain and click on pointer type and select URL Stealth and enter the name of ad-din URL captured in the step# 5 exactly as shown below.
Add the subdomain www and enter the same ad-din URL captured in the step# 5 exactly as shown below.
Click on SAVE
You are done with redirecting the primary domain to subdomain offered by Ad-Din for the website.
Follow this step only if you want to hide the redirected URL in the browser bar.
If you do not want your primary domain, post redirection to look like following https://maltonmasjid.ad-din.site then you need Domain Masking on.
To do that login to domain registrar portal for example https://netfirms.com
Ensure your settings looks like the following, all same as above except the Pointer Type is URL Stealth
Done.
Any domain changes from the registrar site take 24 to 48 hours to propagate on the internet.
NOTE: with domain masking ON the site will be forced to desktop site in mobile. Automatic Mobile Responsiveness will be lost. This is a limitation.
Ad-Din
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