How can we help?

Find answers about building, publishing, domains, billing and managing your site.

Building your site

The builder starts with five quick questions: your venue's name, what kind of place it is, your town, your phone number and your street address. As you answer, a complete example site becomes yours on the screen. It takes about a minute, and you can skip the questions if you would rather go straight in. Then make the rest yours:

• Choose a look. The questions end with a choice of look (Playful, Adventure or Classic). You can change the look and its colours at any time on the left, and what you have typed stays.
• Change the words. Click any words on the page and type over them, or use the numbered steps on the left.
• Change the pictures. Click a picture to replace it with your own. Use JPEG or PNG files. Pictures marked "Placeholder photo" are stand-ins until you add yours.
• Arrange the page. Point at a section and use its bar to move it up or down, hide it, or add another section below it. You can also drag a section.
• Made a mistake? Use Undo at the top.
• Check it on a phone. The Phone button at the top shows your site as a phone shows it.
• Hear from visitors. Your page has an enquiry form, "Send us a message". What a visitor writes is emailed to the address you sign in with, and your reply goes straight to them. To take the form off, hide it under Page sections.

Sections with nothing in them are left off the page, so you never have to fill in something you do not offer.

Signing in and saving

You can try the builder without signing in. To keep your work, choose Sign in to save and give your email address. We email you a six-digit code, which works for ten minutes. There is no password.

Once you are signed in your site saves as you go, and it is there when you sign in from another computer. You stay signed in on a browser for 30 days.

The code has not arrived? Look in your junk folder, check the address for a typing mistake, and ask for another.

Publishing a preview

Choose Publish and your site gets a preview address you can send to anyone. It is free.

• The preview says at the top that it is a preview, and search engines are asked not to list it.
• It stays up for 30 days from when you last published. Publish again for another 30. We email you a few days before it comes down.
• After you change your site, choose Publish changes to send the changes out.

A site needs a name and a street address of its own before it can be published, and the builder asks for them if they are missing. Anything else still left over from our example, such as its phone number, its links and its made-up reviews, is marked "Sample" in the builder and is left off your published site until you put in your own.

Going live on your own domain

Going live puts your site at your own address, such as www.yourvenue.com, without the preview label, where search engines can find it. It needs the paid plan and a domain you own. If you do not have a domain yet, buy one from any domain registrar first; it takes a few minutes.

1. Publish your preview, then choose Go live in the guide at the top of the builder.
2. Type your domain and pay for the plan, by the month or by the year. Payment is on our payment provider's secure page.
3. Back in the builder you are shown the records to add where your domain is registered: a CNAME record for www (name www, value connect.geeksonline.page), and an optional A record for the bare name (name @, value the address the builder shows) so that yourvenue.com without "www" works too. Your registrar's help pages call this "DNS records" or "managing DNS".
4. Choose I have done that: check my domain. A change can take up to an hour to show. Once we see it, your site's security certificate is issued, which takes a minute or two, and your site is live.

• Your email is not affected. Only the website part of your domain changes.
• The website that is there now stops showing from the moment you change the record.
• The address without "www". Add the optional A record and yourvenue.com leads to www.yourvenue.com by itself. If your registrar cannot take it, switch on forwarding from yourvenue.com to www.yourvenue.com there instead.
• Placeholder photos cannot go live. Replace them with your own, or choose Go live without photos when the builder offers it: your site then uses the design that looks finished without any.

Your plan, card and invoices

Choose Account at the top of the builder. From there you can:

• see your plan and the date it renews;
• change the card it is paid from;
• open any invoice;
• cancel your plan, or change your mind and keep it.

If you cancel, your site stays live until the end of the time you have paid for, and you are not charged again. After that it comes off your domain. Nothing is deleted: your site stays saved in your account, and you can go live again whenever you like.

The price for your country is on the pricing section of our home page.

Taking payments: vouchers and passes

Your site can sell gift vouchers and visit passes. It is optional, and your website works the same without it. Everything to do with it is on one page: open Account, then Payments.

Setting it up

1. On your Payments page choose Activate payments. This needs the paid plan.
2. Answer the questions that appear on the page. They come from Stripe, the company that takes the card payments and pays you, which is required by law to know who it is paying. Your answers go to Stripe, not to us.
3. Under What you sell, add a name, a price and a line about each voucher or pass.
4. Choose Publish on the same page. Each item on your site now has a Buy button.

What Stripe asks for

It takes about ten minutes, and you can stop and carry on later. It helps to have these to hand:

• Your business's legal name and its number (your ABN, and your ACN if you are a company).
• Your own name, date of birth and home address, as the person responsible.
• The bank account to be paid into.
• A mobile phone, for a code by text.
• Sometimes, a photo of your driver's licence or passport.

A sole trader is asked the least. A company is asked more: Stripe also wants to know who owns and runs it.

If you already use Stripe, sign in with that login when it asks, and it can reuse your details. Your Payments page always says where things stand: Not finished if Stripe is waiting on you, Being checked while it checks your details, and Active once payments are on. We email you when that changes.

When someone buys

• The buyer pays by card on Stripe's secure page and gets an email with a code.
• You get an email with the same code and the buyer's name, and the sale appears on your Payments page.
• At your venue, ask for the code, find it under Sales and choose Mark as used, so it cannot be used twice.

Money

• What you receive. Each sale is paid into your own Stripe account, less Stripe's card fee and Geeks Online's 2%. On a sale of 50, our share is 1. There is no monthly charge for taking payments.
• When you are paid. Your first payout usually takes 7 to 14 days after your first sale, while Stripe finishes its checks on a new account. After that Stripe pays out to your bank every few days. Your Stripe dashboard shows each payout and its date.
• Refunds are between you and the buyer. Refund the payment from your Stripe dashboard, then mark its code as used on your Payments page so it cannot be redeemed.
• Prices are in your own currency: Australian dollars.
• To stop selling, remove what you sell on your Payments page and publish.

When something is not right

• "It does not point at us yet." The record has not shown up. Check its type is CNAME, its name is www and its value is connect.geeksonline.page with nothing added, then wait a little and check again. The A record for the bare name is optional and never holds this up.
• There is no map on my page. The map appears once we can find your street address. Check the street address and the town in step 4 of the builder. Some new or rural addresses cannot be found yet.
• A payment did not go through. We email you, and the card is tried again. To use another card, open Account and choose Change card.
• I want my account deleted. Email us and we will delete it and everything in it.

Contact us

Write to us here, or email hello@geeksonline.app. We answer by email.

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