How to let people register on your website

By default your website lets visitors register for an account, which is a lovely low-effort way for your database to grow itself. You control what the registration form asks, and every application waits for your approval unless you decide otherwise.

Customising the registration form

1. Log in to your web office and open the ‘Settings’ area.
2. From the left-hand navigation choose ‘Users’, then ‘Registration form’.
3. To remove a field from the form, change its ‘Request information’ option to ‘No’. To make a field compulsory, set it to ‘Yes, Required’.
4. To rename a field, click the edit icon in the ‘Change Text’ column and change the wording.
5. Click ‘Save’ at the top right. A short form gets more sign-ups, so ask only for what you’ll actually use.

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Handling the registrations that arrive

1. New registrations arrive as applications, marked with an applicant symbol next to the database folder in the web office.
2. Open the group’s Members tab and use the filters at the top: deselect ‘Leaders’ and ‘Members’ to show just the applicants.
3. Open the options menu (three dots) next to an applicant and review the application. If the details look like an existing record, a duplicates box appears at the top so you can match them up instead of creating a second record you’d only have to merge later.
4. To welcome them in, choose ‘Give this person access to the website’, set their membership and involvement, and save; they’re emailed a welcome with login details and a link to set their password.
5. If they shouldn’t have a login, perhaps they only registered for your newsletter, choose to decline the application but keep their contact details; they’re sent an email (which you can edit) giving them the chance to have their details removed.
6. ‘Remove’ deletes the application entirely, losing everything they submitted.

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Good to know

• To approve registrations automatically, open the group’s settings cog, go to ‘Access’, and under ‘Applications’ set who applications are automatically approved from. If the option is greyed out, the group isn’t currently allowing registrations at all.
• To turn registrations off entirely, the same ‘Access’ section lets you set applications to ‘No-one’: on the top group this hides the register option for the whole site, and on an individual group it stops applications to that group.
• Extra questions can be added to the form using custom fields set to show under My Profile; the custom fields guides live in Site Settings.
• You can also add people yourself; registration is just the self-service route into the same database.