Table of Contents
Episode Summary
In this episode our host Zach Malloch is joined by Implementation Consultant Ryan Mitchell, Director of Municipal Support, Cullen Barber, Learning Product Designer Bret Alarcon, and Technical Writer, Julia Shefcheck, to discuss using WebTrac Layout Comment Codes to add information to your WebTrac pages that may help customer experience. The group dives into setup steps, common use cases, and light HTML coding to achieve clearer rules and guidelines for patrons making purchases on WebTrac.
Recording
Transcript
Zach Malloch 0:00
The good 41 seconds. That is welcome to RecChat everybody. Today we're joined by some esteemed panelists and a special guest presenter, Ryan Mitchell from the implementation team is going to talk to us all about WebTrac layout some of their most common uses, maybe a couple of uses you haven't thought about and just basically how to use them. How are you doing today, Ryan?
Ryan Mitchell 0:31
Pretty good. How are you Zach?
Zach Malloch 0:32
Not too bad. And we're also joined by Bret Alarcon has all these Cullen Barber Julia Shefcheck. And Brian hatch is joining just to see if any questions you asked might be better asked answered by a team. And if we need to pull in any expertise from other sources, we have plenty of backup. Bret, what else do people need to know to enjoy their RecTrac experience today?
Bret Alarcon 0:57
Well, what people need to know is that there's this little q&a Button down there. If you Click that little Button, you get the little pop up where you can ask your questions. This makes it easier to for us to organize the questions, see what's been answered, see what's still up to be talked about, and such. And there's also a little chat Button, if you want to make any comments, sometimes people smarter than us will make a little comment like, Hey, look at this, this is where you're trying to go. So it's very helpful. And we do have a lot of smart people out there. So
Zach Malloch 1:27
sometimes your perspective on our Screen, helps fill in our blind spots this. Well, thank you for that. Bret. And, Ryan, if you're ready, let's talk about some WebTrac layout. So what is a WebTrac? Layout?
Ryan Mitchell 1:40
All right, so yeah, basically, a WebTrac layout is obviously used on on WebTrac. And we're going to show a couple of examples today, they're mainly used for, you know, extra comments, any kind of extra verbiage usually, that you want to put on any of your splash pages, search pages, different pages within WebTrac, just to a lot of times give extra instructions, you know, if you have a lot of calls coming into the rec center, you know, people getting lost on WebTrac, or can't find what they're looking for in a search, that kind of thing is, you know, real quick, easy way for the customer themselves to get some self help. Options, they're right on the Screen. So can limit some of those calls into into your front desk and stuff like that.
Zach Malloch 2:25
Awesome. And you said you had a few to show us right?
Ryan Mitchell 2:29
Yeah, so let's see, you'll get my Screen share here. Okay. So on this one, like I said, we can put them in a few different places. A very common scenario is, like I said, on a search page, where you might have some search instructions or something along those lines. So just an easy example here, I've got my tee times Button. So we can Click on that. And for me, the one that I have on this page is right here at the top, that kind of shows the search instructions, obviously can be a lot more detailed than that you can write, you know, a good amount in there, for sure. And we would maybe adjust the font size, then to make it all fit. But the idea there is we want to give the customer you know, right right away right at the very top of the page. So you know, first thing they see there, when they get to that page, we give them those instructions. So they'd be you know, hopefully know what to do now a little bit more and be able to make some selections, you know, what course they want to go to the dates and times, and, you know, pick a different date maybe that they want to look at. So they put in their options, maybe they want to play earlier in the morning, and hit search. So just to let them know what to do on that page more or less is a very good example of one of them. Some other things that you can do would be like maybe on the facilities page, another one I've seen a lot is to kind of explain the rate structure, you know, if you have a pretty complicated rate structure in the in the fees setup, and you want to, you know, give some visibility into that there's obviously some item details pages that you can do as well. But if you want to kind of spell it out in layman's terms and more of a text, you know, version, then a comment code is a good, good reason to use that, as well as maybe some, you know, facility restrictions, some things that you can't really put into RecTrac As a rule, per se. So, you know, I just had a customer earlier today that you know, mentioned they don't allow dogs, you know, in the gymnasium, they had someone ask about that if they could do some dog training classes in the gym. So they don't allow that. So that Type of thing where you can't really make a rule for that and RecTrac You know, don't disallow dogs from purchasing kind of thing. So that would be something that maybe you'd put up chop up top here as well to explain some of those kind of upfront rules and regulations about your your park or your facility. So for that one, I'll kind of walk through how that's created on this one. So all of these are managed within RecTrac.
Zach Malloch 5:09
And, Ryan, I think we'll probably see this as you're about to show us how to Build these. But the question came through from Elizabeth, asking if there's a way to apply different customization for mobile users versus full website views.
Ryan Mitchell 5:24
Okay. So, um, that one? I, let's see, I think on that one, it would be the same if I'm not mistaken, because it's all really do it's, the comment codes are going to point to parts of the URL. So the URL will change based on whether you're, you have a desktop or a mobile phone. So I believe that one they would they would apply and and have them both show up on both places.
Zach Malloch 5:54
I believe that is correct, or accurate. Thank you for addressing that.
Ryan Mitchell 6:04
So yeah, basically, that's, that's what we're going to be kind of looking into right now, as well as how these get created. So the, for example, we want to put it here on the facility search page, what I always recommend is get to the page first that you want to make the comment for. That's the easiest way to set these up. So I'm here in WebTrac on my facility search page, so that's the one I want to use. And I'm going to look up top here to the URL again. And on this one, it's going to be the last part of this URL is going to help us Build this comment code. So just a little demonstration on what you know, different parts of the URL is but basically, in your everybody's WebTrac URL, you're going to have this here at the end of what we call the base href. Or the base of your WebTrac URL stays the same. So everything up through webtrac.ws see on your URL stays the same no matter what page and RecTrac that you're no matter what page and WebTrac that you're on. And then after that after the W SC this part of it will change based on which page that you're on. So right now I'm on the facility search page. And we can see that in the URL. It's search dot HTML, module equals fr for Facility Reservation.
Zach Malloch 7:22
Right. And I was wondering, could you would it be fast for you to change your Screen resolution just so we can see the the text a little bit larger?
Ryan Mitchell 7:30
Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. Actually, I can I can do this here to throw it in Notepad or something here? All right. Is that a little bit bigger for people there?
Zach Malloch 7:54
Yeah, that's easier to see a bit.
Ryan Mitchell 7:57
Okay. Make it even a little bit bigger, too. All right. So yeah, with the with the URL, so this is my WebTrac URL, and nothing, nothing too pretty there. But like I said, the the, what we call is the base href. For the base part of the URL is this part here. So from the start of it, and everything all the way up until webtrac.ws. C, so all of you customers out there, you should either have something like this webtrac.ws C, or if you're a hosted customer, you know, it'd be implying your your name in there as well. But it's that.ws C is the last part. So that stays the same no matter what page you're on in WebTrac. And this part of the URL here is going to change based on what page that you're on. So we have the search study HTML. That's the first part that saying that we're on a search page in WebTrac. And then what search page it is, is controlled by this piece here, the module parameters. So Facility Reservation, or Fr. For Facility Reservation,
Zach Malloch 9:03
in a way that I like to kind of share with people when they're trying to conceptualize WebTrac is normally think of an HTML file. And it's all just a text based file with all the code in there. And it's probably better to think of the HTML files here as they're displayed in WebTrac is basically the program so we're referencing the search program that's a dynamically generated HTML Web page. But it's controlled by our facilities or WebTrac. search logic. So searched.html is the name of the program part of that URL.
Ryan Mitchell 9:35
Yep. Exactly. So those ones, so the program and then this would be the parameter. So that's going to come into play like I said, if we want to make a comment code for this, we are going to go into RecTrac here then.
So Within RecTrac, these are all maintained in comment management. So same place is where your splash page is control that as well. And in RecTrac, there will use a little search in the filter menu and pick out comment management. So in your databases, you'll probably have a lot more comments in here than I do. So one trick there as well, to get to all your WebTrac stuff is to use this first column, you can obviously scroll down to the bottom of the list and find all the WebTrac stuff. And, you know, if you're small, like my database, you might not have artists role, but other people that have are going to have a lot of stuff in there. So the easiest thing to do, again, is use that first column, so you can filter by it, or you can also just Click on the record Type up at the top, to sort it the other way. So now the WebTrac stuff is at the top. So just a quick little tidbit there. And on these ones, again, the splash pages in here, you'll see those at the bottom as well. Those are the WebTrac reserved comment types. And these ones that we're creating today are the WebTrac layout. So you might not have too many of these, or you might have some already. But the idea in here is we're going to create one of these WebTrac layout comments for our facility search page. So I'm going to start from scratch here, I'm going to Click Add down at the bottom to break, make a brand new one. And these ones, I generally try to name it based on what page it's going to show up on just because you can add you know, multiple things to it and stuff like that, but you can just find a little bit easier. And you know, exactly okay, this is the one that applies to that page, rather than naming it off of, you know, what kind of comment it is. So and then, like I said, the record Type on these ones are going to be WebTrac layout, that's going to be our second box there. And I'll just same thing, and again. So facility search, so the the left side of the Screen, pretty basic stuff, you know, just like everything else in RecTrac, you get the code and description WebTrac layout is the big one there. And then we're going to fill in in our comment box, what do we want to say? So again, we can explain about the, you know, rate structure or some kind of these, you know, rules and regulations. You know, so that's allowed in the gym, you know, stuff like that, oh, littering and parks. And maybe like, No, we do have resident non-resident pricing, something along those lines. So obviously you can, you can go in a lot more detail in there and you know, really explain different parts of your operations. And again, we can Build it for specific sets of facilities as well. So maybe you have some general stuff that applies to all facilities and other stuff that applies to just some so you can also base it on again, we'll take a look at the URL piece of that and how we can, you know, really specialize, make specific comments there. So that part on the right or sorry, on the left, like I said, pretty basic stuff there. And then on the right hand side, this is where we're going to get into where does this show up in WebTrac. So the first option is the easiest one over here, it's just going to say, Okay, where do we want this to show up the left, top right, or bottom of the page. So for mine on this one, I'm going to select the top that kind of like that one the best. And then just like Zack was explaining as well, the different parts of the URL, we have the layout program, and we have the layout parameters. So if we bring up our option here again, so the program we have there is search dot HTML. So again, you can you know, like I said, get to that page, they are in WebTrac, and use the URL to your advantage. Just come into that URL, copy out, search dot HTML, paste that in. And then for the parameter again, you can do the same thing. You can obviously Type it out as well, it's no problem. The one thing we're going to skip there is that question mark. So we don't need that part. We just need the actual parameter there, which is module equals Fr. And then the last option is if we want to show that you know, always before or after searching, or if we're not using it, this is kind of like the inactive status, if you will, you can have it set ready to go maybe it's a seasonal comment you need to put on there. So sometimes it'll be always and when it's offseason, you can show set that to do not show.
So this is a really, really basic one. And we'll get into a little bit more detail on some of these other options and little customizations we can do. But by me putting that in there I hit save. So now that's that ready to go. It's set to Always search or always this So now I just come back to my WebTrac, page and refresh. And that shows up there at the very top. So like I said, if you want to make it a little bit, you know, easier to read or easy to find these or, you know, stand out a little bit more stuff like that, then these parts, just like the splash page, you can kind of customize and update in HTML text. So for that part, there's a couple resources there that I use as well, it's mainly googling things if I don't know, because I'm not an HTML expert, by any means, either. But, you know, I was able to put together that t time search one here, you know, in a few minutes with a with a couple of Google searches. So this one obviously looks a lot better, it's bigger, it's got the red font on it, it's centered in the page. So looks a little bit better and cleaner versus the facility one. So for this one, if I want to kind of accomplish the same thing there, again, Google is your friend as well, if you if you already know a little bit HTML, then you're you're probably all set. But in this case, we want to, you know, center this, we want to change the font size, and we want to change the font color. So we can kind of go through this here a little bit too. But again, I just go to Google or you know, whatever your search engine is there, and you know, how to set style attributes, you know, in HTML, so you can google something like that, you could just Google how to change font color in HTML, how to change font size in HTML. And obviously, you're gonna get a lot of a lot of resources there through Google. But pretty easy, you just kind of come into here, and I basically just look at, you know how we want to set these up. So stuff like this. And a lot of times, I'll just copy and paste right from here as well. So rather than recreate the wheel, you know, kind of steal what they've done for us and set up here. And I'll just copy that. And then I'll go back to my RecTrac page here, update my facility search comment. So these this is up top what I actually wanted to say. And then here's my example that I'm going to kind of work with here. So I could do something like this. That in place and paste it instead of saying this is a paragraph like the example shoe shown, we're going to do this. And another little easy one here that I don't have to look up. But again, you can look up easily in Google as well as the break tags. So if you want to have two lines of text instead of just one big line, then we're going to do a little caret, E R for break and right caret. So doing this, that should change our color, then to green. So if I hit save here, and I'll go back to my facility, search, refresh. So now that's green, and I've got the two lines of text. So again, you can kind of use Google to your advantage there or, you know, if you have a co worker, or you have a little bit of knowledge there of HTML, you can certainly start playing around with some of these options. And again, always, always a good thing and RecTrac If you're not too sure about it, you can always test it out first, and in Demo, that's never a problem. So that's always a good a good testing ground to try to figure out your HTML options and not impact your live page.
Zach Malloch 18:39
You're definitely getting some questions coming in here. Right.
Ryan Mitchell 18:41
Okay.
Zach Malloch 18:42
Ready for some of that?
Ryan Mitchell 18:43
yeah, yeah.
Zach Malloch 18:44
So Jerry's question is whether there's a limit of only one layout comment per page, or can you have one or two on the top one on the side, one on the bottom? How many can display at the same time?
Ryan Mitchell 18:57
Sure. So that one, I believe, at least in the same spot, you can only have one displaying. So if you wanted to say other things, you know, along with that, you could make a new paragraph down below and add it to this existing one. Right? Definitely no, they can only have one like facility search at the top option. We can test it out real quick. I don't remember off the top of my head. If you can have one on the top and one on the left at the same time. I think you can, but definitely only one in the same position.
Zach Malloch 19:26
Great. And then Suellen is asking. There's actually two questions about the the parameters piece here. But Suellen is wondering if you can go further like, can you have a message show up on the search Screen if there's a particular keyword searched for?
Ryan Mitchell 19:42
Yes, yep. Okay. Yeah. So for that one. Let's see. Let's do it. Again. I've got my keyword here. So again, another easy thing to do if that's what you're looking for is, you know, go to that WebTrac page, Type in your keywords. I think port would work for me. It's search there. here. So that gets us our, you know, to courts. That's what where you want it to show up on. And again, we can look up at the URL, I guess depends too on your search criteria that you have, I've got a lot on my Screen. So there's a lot to go through in the in the URL. But if you're familiar again, with the splash page setup, it's same kind of scenario there. So the part of the URL that I'm looking at is the keyword equals CT. So that's what I typed into their keyword search I typed in CT. So if I do this up on my notepad here, make it easier to see.
Zach Malloch 20:35
And actually, while you have Notepad open, Angela Smith commented that she really likes doing this in notepad plus plus first, she feels it's a little bit easier to Oh, sure, using those HTML options,
Ryan Mitchell 20:46
yes. Yep. That makes sense. For sure. Yep. So those Yeah, you can definitely use, you know, Notepad plus, plus whatever brackets, you know, is another common one as well. So yeah, those ones will definitely help you out with the formatting of it. So for those the HTML comment, I can kind of show you guys that side as well. But in here, so this one, again, if we wanted to search for our courts, for example, this would be the URL that we're using. So just show you that.
So any kind of test it out there, just make sure that's getting you what you want. But that's the idea now, so on our on our comment, if we just wanted it for courts, we would use that part of the URL, and just adding that extra parameter. So we're going to go back to facility search our comment code here. So everything's staying the same, we're just going to add our extra parameter of keyword now. Keyword equals courts. And save. So if I go back to WebTrac, I'm on that page right now keyword court. So if I refresh, that should stay there. But if I take out court and search again, now it's not there, because our parameters are are pointing to just keyword of court.
Zach Malloch 22:13
So for that helps out Suellen. So then, we also had Sally asking something about the parameters. So she's asking about putting in a message at the top of the household page. And when she goes to that, she says household option dot HTML, and then she sees question mark, option equals add. Okay, yep. Just show how that would look if you're building the comment code out.
Ryan Mitchell 22:39
Yeah. So that one, we said as a adding a new household here. Oh, shoot, I forgot. I don't have reCAPTCHA on mine. Okay. I'm going to get the I'll show you on our sales website there something there.
Zach Malloch 22:57
And while you're going to that just real quick question, I see Kimberly's asking if you can have your comment contain links. And as a quick answer to that, yes, you absolutely can.
Ryan Mitchell 23:07
Definitely. So yes, with this one with the household option here, like you said, the parameter and the program are going to be slightly different than our search pages. So on this one, well, this one up here
so for that one, this is the end of the URL for that household add page. So we look at these, here, really the same concept, but the different options there. So we're going to have our instead of search, we're going to have household dot HTML is our program. And our parameter is going to be option equals at. So in RecTrac, here, we make a new one for this council ad. And so on this one again, we can pick you know where we want to show the comments. Top left, right bottom. For our parameter, or sorry, our program, we're going to Type in household dot HTML, and parameters gonna be option equals at and then whatever we want to say over here. So that one will show up on on that Screen. Like I said, it's Sorry, I forgot my reCAPTCHA keys. So this is a different WebTrac page here. But that's the idea. Again, we kind of get to that page. So the household add Screen, and look at what we have in the URL after the.ws. See, so it's kind
Zach Malloch 24:53
of what we already saw on the search page, but this makes it more specific. So if you go to update your household, you won't see this message. If you created it for the add option, so it looks really specify when people are seeing that.
Ryan Mitchell 25:05
Yes, yep. So you can, you can leave off that parameter option. So in our, in our setup here, we had the parameter was option equals add. So like Zack said, if they go to update their household, that's going to be a different URL. So that would be option equals your change or update a camera which one, but if we wanted, so again, you could have a different comment on the Add Screen versus the update Screen. By using the parameter here, if we took that out, and just left the parameter out of that and just have the program of household, then that comment is going to show up on both the ad and the update Screen. So you don't always need a parameter. But you do always need to have a program to tell it what what kind of page it is.
Zach Malloch 25:54
And Stacy's asking an interesting question. So she says it looks like I have some common codes set up in my system. But they aren't set up to show that some of these get created for functional items. And I just have to create additional comments if I want them. And, you know, maybe the full answer would be we need to take a look at your database. But the quick answer is if it's a web layout code, and it's not set to, you know, always display or before or after searching, if it's just set to not display, it's really not affecting anything. It's the same as if it doesn't exist for your web interface, the only benefit that you'd have from keeping it is that you could turn it back on and have that comment show up wherever you had it previously. But if you know you're not using that, or whatever they just, it's up to you to delete them or not. But you can create new codes based on wherever you want them to be in Don't Don't worry about messing anything up for our internal stuff by editing your Web Layout of codes. And then Tremaine had a quick question about whether or not our composition screens in RecTrac are ever going to be coming into a full WYSIWYG editor. And I think that there is a trying to parse through it as Julia did a really excellent job and grabbed some write ups. And we definitely have that in there as an enhancement request. You Yeah, I don't know that it's released or not Cullen or maybe you're a little bit better at parsing through that and understanding exactly what that means at the moment. But the the end result is yes, we are. We're aware of the desire for that. And it looks like we're working towards it.
Cullen Barber 27:45
Yeah, I haven't seen anything come through in any of the sprint demos from development on it yet, Zack, but I know there's been desire to have that. I just don't not sure where, where that's landed in the roadmap.
Zach Malloch 28:00
Gotcha. So something to keep an eye on for future enhancement strain. All right. And Brian, thank you for answering so many of those questions. And that brings us almost to the end of our session already. I think it's got some good information going back and forth here. But let's see. Oh, and Angela is asking if you can make it specific to an interface parameter. So for example, it would display on the WebTrac page for golf but not on the water park for example.
Ryan Mitchell 28:33
Okay, yeah. So yeah, for that one, it would be same idea that interface parameter would become a parameter in here. So a lot of times we'll kind of specify that first. But again, if you if you're on your splash page, kind of your full splash option there which interface parameter there so for you guys that would be your first parameter usually for whichever website it's for. And then everything after that would be extra. So if we started with that, for me, it would be WebTrac underscore one that so in here that would be your first parameter is what I would recommend putting that first and then in here we do our and so again, just like our splash page, common code we separate each of those parameters with the ampersand that on and that would show up then for those different parameters like for I think it's like court in mind. So those ones and We can take a look at that, too. That one's a little bit tougher, because I think, potentially the interface parameter like in my case, there, too, I think drops out. Usually once you hit the Search buttons and stuff. So it might just take a little testing on that. But I believe that would be the route to go is just specify that parameter in the parameter of the layout.
Zach Malloch 30:24
Right? Thank you very much for that. And Kimberly's asking, Kimberly is asking a question, if there's a way to make the words, the words themselves links. So rather than having the full URL listed, just make a Click here, basically. And when they Click there, that's where it actually opens the link.
Ryan Mitchell 30:40
Yes, yeah, that one, as I say, I have a little cheat sheet just because I get asked that quite a bit as well. But another thing you can you can easily Google as well, I think.
But yeah, it's all part of the HTML is in that comment code, so it's, like Target equals blank, if you want it to pop out in a new tab. So in there, this would be what we would put in and again, I'll make that bigger. So this would be what you're going to put in is all of this right here. So a href. And then you put in whatever the the link the you know, outside link that you want to put in there. So just copy and paste that in there. And then this part, and then this is what the customer actually sees. That little part of the HTML text is what the customer sees. And that's what they would Click on.
Zach Malloch 31:53
Exactly. Very good. Thank you. So, yeah, I think that winds us down, that closes all the opening questions at the moment. And yeah, so I guess, final thoughts, any parting words? Or the wisdom you want to impart before we end this?
Ryan Mitchell 32:13
Yeah, I'd say you like, you can definitely use this on on really any page and WebTrac. Again, any any place, I would always, you know, stress, you know, what kind of call do you get most often from your customers, you know, any any pain points and WebTrac? And try to focus on those pages first, you know, and help alleviate some of those calls and help people do it themselves from home.
Zach Malloch 32:36
And, actually, very good point. Heather's asking real quick, though. And I wonder if you could just copy and paste this into a web layout code. So we can see, like, Yeah, I think that might be the answer that she's looking for is kind of a context. So we make it look like this, what does it actually do. So we're basically going to put it into the comment code.
Ryan Mitchell 32:59
So we would put it right in here, and let's just go grab a URL here.
Zach Malloch 33:05
And that could be anything from the entire web, so google.com, to something very specific.
Ryan Mitchell 33:12
We'll go with that. And then this is what we would want that to say. So for the customer, we could say, you know, Click here to learn about HTML, something like that. Save here, and I didn't put it in the same text up top. So it's, it's now over here on the left. But anyway, that's the Click here to learn about HTML, that's what the customer sees. We Click on that. And that will, that one, okay, the wrong thing in my HTML text there, but that should just get us to our actual Web page. But that's the idea. So I was gonna see how I can double check my my text before I put it in the notes here. But that would be the idea, we would just put it right into the comment code, wherever you want to put it within, you know, your paragraph or at the top or the bottom, you know, whatever makes the most sense, but you can definitely put it in you know, as part of the paragraph no problem and, and they just have the little clickable underlying link there to to Click on. Very good.
Zach Malloch 34:23
Well, thank you very much for all your time, Ryan. I'll open it up to everybody else. Bret, Julia, Cullen, if anybody has any final thoughts if they want to add, have your opportunity here. Otherwise, looks like everybody's quiet at the moment. Go ahead and say thank you to everybody for attending and asking such good questions. Hopefully there was something useful here for all of you, Ryan, thanks for once again, sharing all this information and prep. I think we're ready to take us out if you are