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Getting started with your Zahmoo story-bank

You’ve decided you want to use Zahmoo as your story-bank. But how do you get started? Here’s how.

Go to the Zahmoo website, and perhaps first browse around the three focus-areas:

• family
• community
• business

As we’ll see in a moment, these focus-areas also represent different account-plans – different levels and capabilities for your Zahmoo story-bank.

To start creating your account, click on the Sign up link at the top-centre of any page, or the ‘Sign up’ button at the base of the page for any of those Family, Community or Business focus-areas.

This takes you to the Plans page, where you choose which account-plan you want to start with. (You can change to a different plan later if need be.) The accounts-plans differ on:

• members – number of people who can add or edit the stories in your story-bank
• collections – number of separate groups or categories of stories (in addition to any number of search-tags that you can attach to stories)
• storage – storage-space for stories (usually not relevant for text-stories, but important if you’re going to store stories as audio or video)

Click on the Sign up button for the respective plan.

The sign-up is in two parts, both on the same overall form: creating your account, and creating your story-bank.

To create your account is straightforward. There are five fields you’ll need to fill in, for your forename and surname, your email-address, and your password. Type the same password again in the ‘Confirm password’ field so that the system can verify the password.

(We recommend to use a password that is easy to remember but hard to guess: three random words separated by hyphens works well for this, or the usual combination of letters, numbers and punctuation-marks. Note that the password is case-sensitive: upper- and lower-case are not the same.)

To create your story-bank, type your family, community or organisation-name into the first field, with an optional department-name (usually relevant only for organisations) in the second field. These are just free-form text in the usual way.

The third field, ‘Subdomain’, needs a little more care. This will be used to identify your story-bank on the internet, and hence will need to follow the internet naming-rules: lower-case only, no spaces, no punctuation. (Hyphens are allowed between words, though – such as jones-family or marham-bridge-club ). For example, as explained below this field on the form, if you enter acme here, the Zahmoo ‘subdomain’ internet-address, which you’d use to access your story-bank, would be would be http://acme.zahmoo.com .

(The system will check to make sure that no-one else is using this subdomain-name, and will ask you for an alternate name if this is already in use.)

The ‘Plan’ pulldown’ will already be preset to the plan you selected earlier, but you can change it here if you wish.

You should read the Zahmoo terms of service and privacy-statement; you must check the checkbox to confirm this before continuing.

Click the ‘Confirm’ button to create your account and story-bank.

Finally, you’ll need to set up instructions for a regular payment for the respective Zahmoo story-bank fee for the account-plan you chose. At present we use PayPal for this. Fill in the form as required, depending on what type of credit-card or credit-account you use.

(The charge won’t take place until 30 days after you set up the account: if you cancel before then, no charge will be made.)

Once that’s done, you’re ready to start using your story-bank. We’ll talk more about how to do that, and get best value from your story-bank, in further posts here.

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