Making Democracy Work
Enter information about your League to be used in all pages of your site. All about your web site address and email addresses.
Just correct it. It should always be of the form "League of Women Voters of ....".
No problem. The plural form is accepted.
We don't use it now.
Just change it. You are assumed to know best! Then please send an email to support@lwvnet.org to let us know.
There are two options.
Before you go live, put your chosen name in the registration form in the area "Domain name for your site".
- We encourage you to buy your own domain name.
- But you may use a Web site address of http://yourleague.yourstate.lwvnet.org where "yourleague" is the name of your League (or an abbreviation of this name) and "yourstate" is the two character abbreviation of your state. We have pre-assigned the value for "yourleague", but you may ask to change it.
You cannot change it in the form. Send an email to support@lwvnet.org and request a change to be made. And don't hesitate to do so before you go live! After you go live, you may change it, but your official URL would be changed, so you want to have an appreciation of the effect of such a change (business cards, stationery, etc.).We recommend you buy your own domain name.
Yes. Enter your domain name (without the "www.") into the registration form in "Domain Name for your site". See Go Live - Transfer Domain Name for more information.
Although optional, we recommend that you buy your own private domain name of the form lwvyourleaguename.org. You want a domain name that is easy for people to "get" when you say it. Think of writing a 30 second radio PSA. How many seconds will it take for people to "get" your Web site address?
No.
You may contract with a company like AITDomains.com or Godaddy.com or 1and1.com to obtain your own domain name of the form lwvyourleaguename.org. It is your responsibility to obtain the name and to continue paying the fee for the use of this name. Do NOT buy any webhosting or other services including privacy options -- just register the domain name. The cost varies, but is usually about $12-15 a year.Be sure to buy your domain name from an accredited company. Before you re-register your domain name, check that your selected company is still accredited.
Most domain name registration companies offer a "privacy option" which hides your contact information from the public. If you use addresses and phone numbers associated with your League rather than a person, there is no need to consider this option.The only valid reason to use such a service is to keep personal addresses or phone numbers off the internet.
See more information including how to remove Domains by Proxy from GoDaddy.
A domain name registration has, among other values, a place to define the "domain name servers" (DNS). These are addresses of the primary and secondary computers that host the web pages that make up your web site.Some time before you "go live", you would go to the Web site where you purchased your domain name and assign the name servers to reference our LEW DNS as:
ns.lwvnet.org
ns2.lwvnet.org
We will verify that you have done this when you request a go live. The ability to access your Web site with your own domain name will happen at the time you "go live".
Yes. Just purchase your domain name and set the correct domain name servers. Then send an email to support@lwvnet.org and ask to use the new domain name. We will change the domain name in your League registration form and make the necessary changes to give you the ability to access your Web site with the new domain name and receive email with that domain name. You may still access your Web site and receive email using the old lwvnet.org domain name.When the new name is added, you will probably want to change all places that you used the old web site name and any email forwarding addresses using that name: in your newsletter, business cards, letterhead, for example. You may also want to tell other web sites that link to you that you now have a new name. There will be no rush to make these changes as both names still work.
You can check your current domain name registration by going to http://www.pir.org and keying in your domain name (eg. lwv.org) into the search. Look for the "Expiration Date" line. That is normally the date your registration will expire.Be sure to keep your administration contact email address up to date. That is usually the way that registration companies notify you that your domain name is about ready to expire.
The first thing you will notice is that the registration company will replace your web site with a page of its own. You will think someone "stole" your site. Don't worry: your pages are still on LEW's servers. But you need to pay your domain name registration fee to restore the ability to see those pages using your domain name.The domain name registry company will put your domain on "Client Hold" status and stop access to your Web site using that domain name. (Your site will still be accessible with http://lwvnet.org/st/shortname). It may also update the domain registration "Expiration Date" to the same date, next year. The "Last Updated On" record will show a date one year prior to that expiration date. See How Domains Expire for more information.
DON'T FORGET TO RENEW!!! It may cost you real money to rescue your domain during the redemption period. One League recently paid $150!!! If you let the redemption period expire, someone else might buy the rights to use your name. You really don't want that to happen.
We recommend that you keep records of the domain name company's Web site address and your account name and password needed to access your domain name registration. If you change webmasters, this is a very important piece of information to transfer to the new webmaster.If you don't have that, you must contact your domain name registration company (use whois.com to find) and ask them to tell you your account name and password. Most likely you will have to mail or fax a letter making this request on League letterhead signed by your President.
It's up to you, but we don't recommend it. This is an optional field so you may leave it blank.
It's up to you, but many people do not want their home phone number on the Web. The number is not identified as a personal number, so it's not likely to cause a problem.
Yes. Please enter the current dues amount for a single membership, a household membership and any other types of memberships that you offer (both dues amount and type of membership).
Yes. This specification must be made in the League registration data form. By default, all Leagues are considered 501(c)(4) organizations and have the ability to accept tax-deductible donations to an Education Fund.If you have qualified as a 501(c)(3) organization, go to the registration form section titled "Detailed Information about your League" and check the box that says: "The League overall qualifies as a 501(c)(3) tax deductible organization". When you approve and update all pages, you will see this information reflected on the Join the League Form and the Donate form.
These items are in the area of the League registration data form with the heading "Web Site Content Definition":Site Name Suffix: Normally, you should leave this blank. When working on your Members web site, this will say "Members Only Pages".
Home Page Slogan: A short slogan, like "Make Democracy Work" is displayed on the Home page and on all other pages. We recommend that it be short -- perhaps no more than 8 words.
Home Page Search Description: NEW!! When someone searches for content with a search engine like Google and your site home page is found, these words will be displayed as a description in the search results. Make this compelling and a clear description of your site so that people will click!! These words will not appear on any web page of your site.
Home Page Introduction: The default for this area is the mission statement. It will be displayed only on the home page just below the slogan.
Optional Important Message: NEW!! Sometimes you may want to highlight a single very important message or event on your home page before the featured content section. This is the place for it! Don't make it too long.
Sidebar Below Menu: NEW!! The contents of this area will be placed below the table of contents in the menu column of every page. It is intended for social media icons or other widgets. Please see Graphics You Can Use for some of these icons. For example, during election season, you could place one of the Vote411 widgets here.
Remember that only pages with green dots are released to the public. When you make a change to the site registration data, follow these steps to preview other pages:
- Click on "Preview". Then look at that page in the area you changed just to check for things like spelling errors.
- If OK, then click on "Approve" (do not click on "Approve and Update Released Pages"!!). Now your site generation home page will show pink dots next to all released pages. Any changes just made are not seen by the public.
- On the site generation home page, click on the page you want to preview, for example, the Home page.
- You will see any changes that you made to the registration data that apply to the home page at this time. If changes would have affected other pages, you may also preview those.
- If you need to make any changes to the registration data, you may do so and then preview the changed pages again.
- When you are happy with each of the affected pages, click on "Update Released Pages" at the bottom of the list of pages on the Site Generation Home Page. This will turn all of those pink dots green and all changes will be released to the public.
Login to your site generation home page and click on "View/Edit League Registration". Click on "Edit". The areas to make changes to email addresses are:
- "Information about the Web site Editor" (webmaster)
- "Primary Email Address Forwarding" (main and billing)
- "Additional Email Address Forwarding Information" (as many others as you would like)
(In the explanations below, we use email addresses of the form "league@yourleaguename.org". If your League does not have a private domain, the form of your email addresses will be "league@yourleague.xx.lwvnet.org" where "xx" is your state code.)
Yes. Every League using LEW will have three email addresses by default: "league@yourleaguename.org", "wm@yourleaguename.org" and "billing@yourleaguename.org". You may create others. These email addresses are a forwarding service. This means that when someone sends an email to "league@yourleaguename.org" the email will come to the LEW computer server which will then look up the "real" email address(es) associated with the "league" address and forward the email to those address(es).
Use your League's current official email address or the email address(es) of the person(s) who should receive and respond to general email sent to you. All email sent to "league@yourleaguename.org", for example, will be forwarded to the email address(es) you specify.
We recommend that you advertise the email address widely on your publications, stationery, and business cards. Use this address when your state and national League organizations ask for your League's official email address.
Our state office sends each League customer a bill via email every year on your anniversary date. We want to send it to the person(s) in your League responsible for paying that bill. You could specify the email address of the person responsible for your web site and she can forward it to your treasurer. You could directly specify the email address of your treasurer. Or both. Remember to update the address(es) if the people responsible change.To change this value, edit your League's registration data and change the "League Billing email forwarding address" in the section titled "Primary Email Address Forwarding".
If you were an active customer in August 2013, we pre-filled this field with the email address(es) you had specified for your primary "league" email address. You may change it.
If you have any questions about the status of your bills, please contact billing@lwvnet.org.
You may define many other email forwarding addresses. We recommend that you consider defining email names like "president" or "membership". Then you can list the email addresses under "Contact information". When the State League asks for your president's email address, you can always use "president@yourleaguename.org" year after year. Remember to change the forwarding email when your League elects a new president.
There are two options. You could define a forwarding email name of "co-presidents" and then specify two email addresses in Email Forwarding Address. Then when someone sends an email to co-presidents@yourleaguename.org, both people will get a copy of the message.Alternatively, you could make two forwarding definitions: one for Co-president1 and another for Co-President2. Or one for President and another for Co-president.
No. The forwarding process is separate from the listing of contacts.
The LEW system does not display email addresses on any web page under LEW control like the Contact Us page. Instead we display a link with words like "send email". When the user clicks on such a link, a new page is displayed inviting the user to fill out a form to send a message to the underlying and hidden forwarding email address or actual email address. Before sending the message, the user must match a graphical image of letters and/or numbers. This step helps prevent spam.
Yes. We encourage you to use your forwarding email addresses to communicate with the public. The email address will be seen on the page, but we encode the address which stops the bulk of spammers from finding it by writing programs. People can still see it and use it.
Is the private address someone's personal email address? If so, by using the forwarding feature, you can include your "league" or "action" or "president" email address on your stationery, business cards, and League publications and never have to worry about changing it when people change. Simply come back to the Registration Data and change the "real" address to go to your new person."league@yourdomain.org" is much more professional than someone's "aol.com" address, e.g.
If the "real" address is a generic official email address that you are already using, then you could consider to use that.
A good test is to ask yourself what happens when you get a new president or main contact person in your League. Will the new person get the intended email? Or will the previous president need to forward email to the new president, for example?
Maybe. Some online email programs like Yahoo and Outlook (and probably Outlook Express) allow you to create "personalities" or definitions of alternate email addresses. If you prove to Yahoo mail that you receive email at a given address, it will let you send email from that address.If you select an alternate email address and send the email, then when the person who gets the email clicks on "reply", their email program will fill in your alternate email address. Your original address is still in the detailed message header, but most people aren't going to bother to read the fine print.
NOTE: Gmail no longer allows you to send email from an address that forwards email to you. It does allow people who previously set that up to continue to send email this way. Please see using Google GSuite if this function is important to you.Here is how it used to work: Click on "Settings", then on "Accounts and Import". Look into the section labeled "Send Email as". Then click on the button "Send mail from another address". Follow the instructions and Gmail will then list that address in this section. Also check the first option under "When receiving a message:" (Reply from the same address the message was sent to).
Then when you are sending a message, your "From" address becomes a "drop-down" and you can select which email address you want to use when sending any email message.
You may define as many alternate addresses as you wish. For example, if you receive email sent to "league@..." and to "wm@...", you can define both of these email addresses to Gmail and then choose which one to use when sending or replying to a message.
At the time of this writing, here is the way to tell Yahoomail that you want to send from another email address:1. In the upper right corner of your mail screen, click on "Options"
2. Click on "More options..."
3. In the left hand column, click on "Accounts"
4. Click on "Add Account" (in the bar across the top of the main part of the screen)
5. Fill in "Web site email" (or whatever you want) in the Account Name field.Put your name (or League's name) in the "From Name" field
Put your LEW email address (for example, league@lwvxxxx.org) in the email address field.
Then follow their instructions for sending an email to yourself to prove that you can receive email.
Yes. For example, with Gmail, you can tell it to download the email to Outlook or other email programs (go to "Settings", then "Forwarding POP/IMAP").However, Outlook (in 2009) will only let you send from one alternate email address.
We really try to reduce the amount of spam you get, but cannot guarantee to stop all spam. We recommend that you use an email service that provides a spam catcher which should filter out a lot of this email. You can use a free email address from Yahoo or Google, for example, as they have good spam filters. Or many anti-virus programs also filter spam.
The most probable reason is that your email server has filtered out that good email along with the spam. Check your bulk or spam folder every once in a while looking for real email. Also sometimes it takes a while for email to move through the Internet. It may take a couple of hours even when the message is short. This should be rare, however, unless the message sent had a very large attachment.Or if they sent the email to you at two different email addresses and you got only one copy and you use Gmail, read on!!
First, please check that you spelled the email address correctly in your LEW form. Are you using GMail (Google Mail)? Then you may have found a rather annoying Gmail "feature" -- it seems to delete email that it thinks you have already seen. If you send an email from your Google email address to a LEW email address that will be forwarded back to you, Gmail will read it, note that you already have it, and throw it away without any notice to you. It simply disappears.Or this problem can occur if someone sends one email to one or more of your LEW forwarding addresses and also to your real email address. When you ask Gmail to read this email, you will receive only one of them. At least Gmail was working this way (after exhaustive testing) in Feb. 2010. (And is still working like this in 2015).
So to test that our email forwarding is working as you expect, you must ask someone else to send the email to you or you must use a method other than Gmail (e.g. Yahoo mail) to send. The test email should be sent ONLY to your LEW forwarding address. Or use the Contact Us forms on your web site.
Yes. If you would like a copy of it, please send the request to support@lwvnet.org.
Yes. But it isn't easy. Conceptually, LEW remains your webhosting service, but you and we make changes so that Google handles email requests.Why would you want to go to this effort? Two reasons:
Here are the steps to go to Google Gsuite. Other email services may be similar.
- You are planning to migrate to MyLO which has no email services.
- Your members want an email address like president@lwvmyleague.org and want to be able to send email using that address.
- Start to set up your Gsuite Account. Note that if your League has acquired 501(c)(3) status for all League operations, you should get a free account.
- At one point, you need to verify that you own your domain name (lwvmyleague.org). Choose the HTML file option. Get that file and attach it in an email sent to support@lwvnet.org. Be sure to include your League's name, state (if not obvious), and domain name. Do NOT change nameservers in your domain name registration. They must remain ns.lwvnet.org and ns2.lwvnet.org.
- We will store that .html record in the main directory of your site and send back an email.
- You need to define all required email addresses and those additional ones you have specified to League Easy Web in your GSuite account. These are "league", "wm", "billing", and all found in "Additional Email Address Forwarding Information" in your League's registration data area. If you don't define one and someone sends an email to that address, perhaps by filling out the Contact Us form, the message will be lost. Note that any subsequent email addresses added to LEW must also be added to your GSuite account. Your GSuite account may have more addresses than those known to LEW.
- Ask Google to verify that you own your domain name. When verified, send another email to support@lwvnet.org saying the verification is done and all needed email addresses are defined to GSuite.
- We will store special records telling the Internet to send any email requests to your Google GSuite process. All web page accesses will continue to be handled by League Easy Web, as usual.
- Test email and web site accesses and all is well!
Every LEW site may use a pre-built canned page that tells the public how to contact you. The information on this page comes from the Registration Data. The email addresses you list in this section will be used to receive the messages people enter from the Contact Us page. Therefore, to change the information on this page, you must edit and change the League Registration Data form (see "Updating" below).
Think of why people may want to contact someone in your League. Consider membership, president, public relations, elections, webmaster. Do you have a "hot topic" that the public may want to comment on or ask a question? Of course, you will want to get the permission of the people involved and/or your board. You want them to be responsible for answering the email in a way that reflects well on your League.
You may use the "forwarding" email addresses previously defined or people's private email addresses. Because the email addresses in the contact list are hidden from public view, it does not matter which you use.
Because our system needs to have the correct definitions in order to forward email, the function cannot be tested until after your site is activated. At the time we activate your site, we will test that your "wm" and "league" email forwarding addresses work according to your specifications.After you site is active, we encourage you to periodically test all email address links and email forwarding.
Open your active site in a browser as the public would or click on "Open released pages in new window" from your site generation home page. Warning: If you open your "Contact Us" page in preview mode from your site generation home page, or click on one of the other email links in the footer of a page in its preview mode, the email function will not work even if your site is active.
Then we encourage you to test all links on the Contact Us to be sure they work. See also someone told me she didn't get my email and testing the forwarding function. The most common reasons that an email address test could fail is that there is a typo in the registration data page or directly on the web page.
When you login, you are taken to the "Site Generation Home Page". To get back to the registration form, click on "View/Edit Registration data". You will see the preview page for your data. In the top right section of that page, click on "Edit".Also, when you edit a page that could have content in the main body of the page that comes from the registration form, an extra button is shown at the top of the page: "Edit Registration". These pages are: Home, Contact Us, Join, Join Form, Donate.