Branding web sales to make it look like the main web site

Theatre Manager comes with a set of web pages that can be dropped in place so you can have web sales running in very short order. These web pages provide all the functionality of the web sales component of Theatre Manager including ticket sales, online donations, gift certificate sales, managing the shopping cart, and much more.

While these web pages contain all the functionality, many venues like to change the look of the web pages to 'brand' the pages in their own image. To brand a site, the recommended steps are below. We recommend making a minimum of changes to the pages as it means that you can upgrade pages when we add future functionality quite easily. This is possible because we have tried to isolate the required changes to a few files at most. In practice, this works out very well.

The general approach to branding the web site is:

1. Use the sample pages and review the sales process. Also see examples of what others have done to show possibilities.
2. If possible, change only the style sheets as the first step. Then use the pages for a while before making deeper changes.
3. Make some adjustments to notes within Theatre Manager to sales options, text, notes, maps etc that display on the web. It allows control of a number of changes to remain in the hands of the end user.
4. As a final step, adjust the text content on a few important web pages. Likely, there should only be changes required for mailing, box office hours and a couple of other pages.

   If you do want to change a page, copy that page into the same location in the WebPagesEN/tmCustom folder and make the changes to the COPY. Theatre Manager will reference the tmCustom folder first and use the page there, if it finds one.

   Try to minimize changes to pages as it affects ability to upgrade pages later on.

Before anything can be changed, you need to know where the web pages are. They are always installed in the HTDOCS folder of the apache server that is set up when Theatre Manager is first installed. If you need remote access to this folder, you may need to set up an FTP server or File Sharing to the HTDOCS folder, or simply do the work on the apache machine. (Talk to your IT person if you need to set up access via something like Filezilla).