Please take a moment to read this page completely and view the images at the bottom of the page. Click them to open them. Commentary is in red bold lettering.

When you see your business listed on the membership directory, your login and password as described below will be active. Until your business shows up on this page, the instructions below will not work. It usually takes about 24 hours for your access to be set up after sending the form.

First: Determine Your Login and Password for the Local Commerce Section
Your login will be the first 5 characters of the name of your business. None of them will be capitalized and spaces are not used in your login or counted as one of the first 5 characters. If you entered ABC Consulting as the name of your business for the Membership Directory, your login will be abcco, again all in lower case with no spaces. If you are an individual member and are listed as Bob and Mary Smith, your login would be boban, but if you listed yourself as Bob & Mary Smith, your login would be bobma. No punctuation is used in the login. If you still are unsure, go to the Member Directory and look at how your business name is entered. It will be the first line of your listing. Count the first five letters or number, disregarding spaces and punctuation. Then make this all lower case and that will be your login.
If the name of your business starts with “Mineola” or “East Texas”: If the name of your business is Mineola Plumbing or Mineola Whatever, the word Mineola is skipped for login selection purposes. So the login for Mineola Plumbing would be plumb. The same is for if your business starts with “Wood County”. Obviously several business start their name with these terms so we are skipping them for login purposes.

Second: Determine Your Password:
Your password will be set to the last four digits of your telephone number. If your phone number is 903-569-2087, then your password will be 2087. We encourage you to change your password. See the instructions below for changing your password.

You need an email address to be able to post in the “Local Commerce” section of the web site. Your email address is added when we set up your account and your cannot be changed.

To get to the login page. Click the “Member Login” link at the very bottom of any public page of the web site. This will take you to the member login page. From there, enter your login and password as determined from the instructions on this page.

At the login page, enter your login and password.

At this point, it might be helpful for you to view the images at the bottom of this page. They are screenshots of what you will be doing in the next steps.

You will now see the Dashboard. On the left side column you will see a “Posts” section. Under it, click “Add New”. This will take you to a screen where you can add new posts. Notice that above this link is the “Edit” link. You will be able to edit posts that you make. You will not be able to edit anything on the web site other than the posts you originally made. Also, toward the bottom of this column is a link where you can update information on your profile.

Follow the 5 steps on the next page and you are done.

• Step 1 - Enter Your Title
• Step 2 - Enter your content.
• Step 3 - Enter tags. Tags are terms that are relevant to your post that will become useful to visitors down the road when our site has many of these types of postings. Separate them with a comma and no spaces. Generally speaking, two or three tags is fine for a post. If you are ABC restaurant with a fried fish special, your tags might be something like: fish,special,abc
• Step 4 - Select your categories. You can select as many as you wish, but please select only relevant categories. Readers will have the ability to click on a category and see all listings in that particular category, so it is important that they be applied correctly.
• Step 5 - Publish your work. You have the ability to go back and edit it. PLEASE DO NOT WRITE IN ALL CAPS. MOST INTERNET USERS FIND THAT ANNOYING.

Note:
The “chamber2009″ password you got in your newsletter does not have anything to do with logging in to your member account. That password is the same for all members and only gets you access to the non-public section of the web site, such as the page you are presently viewing.

Take a moment to look around your profile page. You can enter as little or as much information here as you want to. Just remember that it’s all seen by the public.

By default, we set your Nickname to the name of your business and set that name to show publicly when you make a post. It is best to use the name of your business here rather than your name, unless they are the same.

Change Your Password:
It is best if nobody else knows it. You can change your password in the Profile section as discussed above and in Screenshot #2 below. Here is a link to your profile page, where you can change your password. The password change section is at the bottom of the page. As with anything else you do on the Profile page, you need to click the “Update Profile” button at the bottom of the page.