You will receive notification from our staff in the form of a greeting letter that your new portal is ready to go.

1. I print out the notification so that I have a hard copy of the information.
2. I read it carefully.

You are ready to log into your portal for the first time.

You are sent a password, but it will not work until it is setup by you. If you try to use it first time you will get an "Access is denied"! Your first login will use a generic password -- admin -- so as soon as you get your greeting letter with the log in to change it!.

Click the link to your portal admin area in the email you received. Bookmark the page! Log in. You are now entering the Welcome page.

Along the side of the screen, in the black bar, you'll see links the links to the various sections of your admin panel. Click the link that reads Options. Now you'll be on a page that offers several options.

First click the link for Main / Generic Options. Change the URL in the top box to point to your portal. So I'm changing mine to read: http://portalhelp.searchking.com

Change the email address to your searchking email. You should have signed up for this at the same time you applied for your portal. My address is kathi@searchking.com so that's what I enter.

The next section is display attributes. Let's leave those alone for right now, with the exception of changing the password. Change "admin" to whatever the greeting letter sent you in the Welcome letter.

Under Search Engine Settings, you'll want to leave most of this alone. At this point you should be using the iWeb database system.

I'm going to leave most of the rest of this section alone. OK, now we are going to Save Changes. Be real careful about your margarita intake before you do this. I'd hate to have you press one button over to the right by mistake!

Now, your options have been saved and you are told you need to reload the admin program. Now, logout. Try your new login. Then send an email off to SearchKing to make sure it works.

OK, if your new login worked, you are back at the Welcome page. Click Options again. Under Hyperseek Options, click Main Options. In the first box, give your search engine a name. Don't change the path in the second box! In the third box, enter the text you want for your home link. I'm using the text "Home" and I've entered the URL for your portal in the box next to it. Drop down a bit and fill in your default META title, description, and keywords value. If you aren't sure about what to put here, you should spend some time reading about META tags in the forums. You can fill this in later. Click the Save Changes button. You haven't changed your password this session, so you can click the Return button to get back to the Program Configuration (Options) screen.

Now click Main / Home Page Options. You can safely leave most of this page alone. You do need to decide how you want your categories to show on the home page. The descriptions of your choices are pretty self-explanatory. I'm using the description option. This option takes up more space on your page, but it also boosts the keyword density on your portal's home page. If you want to compete in the search engines and you don't have a lot of other text on this page, you may also want to use the descriptions. Press "Save Changes" and then "Return" to get back to the main Program Configuration screen.

Now click Category Options. There's nothing urgent to set here, but I'm going to specify that I want my categories shown in 2 columns and that I don't want to use the category folders. It might seem like saving the changes here would remove the folders from your front page, but unfortunately it doesn't. We're going to take a sidetrip out of the Program Configuration to determine how to complete this setup option. First, though, save your changes. Then go back over to the menu along the left side of your screen. Click on Hyperseek. You are now looking at the main Hyperseek control panel. We'll be spending a lot of time here later. For now, though, click Template Editor in the lower part of the page, middle column. Once there, click the Main Page Cats button. Here you'll see a very short template that you can modify to affect the way your categories show up on the main page. If you don't want folders on your main page, modify the template so that it looks like this:

<TABLE BORDER=0>
  <TR>
    <TD>
      <<CATEGORY>>
      <<SUBS>>
    </TD>
 </TR>
</TABLE>

Save your changes, then go back over to the left-side navigation menu and click Options to go back to configuring your portal. Under Hyperseek Options, click Listing Options. There is nothing here that you urgently need to change. I'm choosing to have extra pages accessed by Links. I'm fixing the spelling in the message for "No documents Found" message. (There is no apostrophe in its when used in this context.) I've also edited the text for Site Reviews and chosen to display listings as "normal." Save your changes and return to the main Program Configuration Screen.

Now I'm going to click on the Search Options link. I'm choosing not to show elapsed time on searches since I don't think most visitors will care. I'm not editing the Keyhole post URL as the greeting letter tells me to leave it alone and I always do what the greeting letter tells me to do. I want to sort category lists alphabetically by title in search results. I also want the search results sorted by title alphabetically. I don't know enough about the algorithm to change the raw points settings, and I figure they don't really apply if you are returning results by alphabetical order. I'll ask about that later. I want matched terms to show up as bold in the returned matches. Dropping down a bit, I say Yes to showing category matches, yes to showing search criteria, and yes to offering a Qualifying (Refined) Search option. I Save Changes and press Return.

Now I'm going to click the Add URL Options link. the greeting letter says that 10 is a good value to put in the top box (spam timer). I'll believe him. Drop down a bit. I want a Contact Name in the submit form and I want it to be a required field. You may want more or less information for your database. Drop down some more. I want Hyperseek to verify all links, but I don't really care if it looks for certain text on the submitted pages. I'm going to make one more change in this section. I want Hyperseek to check for duplicates when reviewing sites. I'm going to ask just for Domain Duplicates at this point. Maybe when I get billions of sites in my portal, I may want to be stricter, but right now this will do. Click Save Changes and Return.

I'm not going to build HTML yet, so I'm not going to worry about these settings right now. In the left hand column, choose Hyperseek. That will take you to the Control Panel. You are going to spend a lot of time looking at this control panel, so let's take a quick look around.

First, on the left-hand side there are links to Tutorials. I'd recommend that you read them so that you can get the most from your portal.

We are now going to venture into the Template Editor. It's under third section at the bottom of the page "DISPLAY AND UTILITIES in the first column under Display. We need to edit our portal title in two pages. Click the template editor link. Although there is other stuff here, we are going to do one simple thing to two pages (Default and Hyperseek Home Page). Choose one in the drop-down box and click Edit Template. You'll be taken to the template editor window. Find where it says "Your Portal Name" and change that to, well, your portal name. I'm not feeling very original just now, so I'm going with just plain old PortalHelp. I can fuss with that later. Click Save and you'll be taken to the edited page. Click the OK button. Rinse, lather, repeat with the other two pages. Don't touch any of the other pages right now. Go back up to the black bar and click Go to get back to your Control Panel.

The next step to getting set up is to develop a directory structure. This is not something that you should do on the fly.

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