Website designers who use BC & Muse..Help

[Izmael]

As a website designer, should I encourage my clients to set up their own BC accounts and create their websites (using Muse) within those accounts OR...

Should I put them all under my BC account?

Im a bit confused how it all works.

I can finally enable clients to edit their own content (cms) but they have to use BC in order to do so.

Ive never used BC before so im not sure how other website designers manage their client's sites using BC.

[Izmael]

I should note that I am not interested in the partnership plan.  Just want to know what makes more sense. Thank you

[Liam Dilley]

You cant put them all under your account if you dont become a partner.

In terms of editing content etc - BC is a CMS, this is the idea people have their site developed and designed and they run it.

A site is built depending on the needs of the clients project and of course to the skills of the person doing it so how the business uses the website depends on this.

If they use eCommerce, any custom development around that, extra functionality.. If you have built some funky webapps to give them some cool uses, how you train them on that etc.

You got the incontext editor you can setup in your code and have them use.....

If your just starting out and using Muse there is a lot to learn in BC. Check out the guide section on these forums, 3rd party links are on the right side as well.

As a note though - Muse will only get you so far. You will need to be able to get up to speed on CSS, HTML, Javascript and BC.

[thetrickster888]

If you plan for making a go of BC for your clients you need to signup as a Partner.  There's a free partner plan that you can use to get started and includes the ability to create websites for your clients under your partner account.  All accounts will be tied to you and your BC Partner admin login will work across all the sites and give you FTP/Admin access to your client sites.

There's no other way to build BC sites for your customers without requesting their login information to login to BC/FTP to publish the site.  Get the free partner program, silly.  It's cheap as free.

Down the road, if you like the system you can pay to upgrade to a standard or premium partner that includes the ability to upcharge and bill on your own terms, rebrand the whole BC Admin area and make commissions on client hosting costs and commission from your resellers that you've referred. You get 10% of resellers whole monthly haul.

[Izmael]

This is exactly what had me confused.  Here's how I currently do it:  All my clients have their own hosting accounts and I appoint myself as administrator.  It would be considered unethical (in my opinion) to set up hosting under MY godaddy account where they would have no access to it without me giving them my password, etc..

So I was wondering how it works with BC.  I didn't know the partner program was free.  You cleared up a lot of question marks for me.

Thanks.

[thetrickster888]

Yea- but just a warning. BC and Muse integration is still evolving. There was a blog post recently which has a great screencast on Muse and BC workflows.  Check it out at http://www.businesscatalyst.com/bc-blog/adding-business-catalyst-features-to-your-muse-sites

Good luck

[Liam Dilley]

You dont host it.

Just picked this up. Ignore that.

You dont host any BC sites.

You may host flat file Muse sites hooked into BC on what you want but if your using BC its a hosted sollution on the now amazon servers via Adobe.

A partner account is a blanket basically for clients. The partner program exists because as a company offering sites and support for clients you have access to features that you, as the admin just under your clients sites wont ever have access too.

There are beta features and other features stable to use I use daily you not as a full partner will never have access to. ITs one of the many perks.

You as a partner never count to the user count on a site and so you give your clients their admin access, you have your access to their sites but it never is counted as a user.

Also the partner program free version is slightly different, gives you some more tools but its kind of like the basic. Full is really the only way to go to ensure you get everything you need.