Using Your Practitioner Membership Effectively

Submitted by yyh_staff on Tue, 09/22/2009 - 11:00am

As premium practitioner members you are valuable members of our community and play an important role in the sharing of information with people interested in complementary and alternative medicine around the world.  We thank you greatly for your support and offer our help to assist you with making the most effective use of our listing and publishing service.  We have compiled the following instructions to help you accomplish the basic tasks for each service we offer.

If you have not yet joined us as a premium practitioner member and listed your practice, please sign up here.

As the tasks printed here often require looking at the instructions and performing tasks in another window or tab on your web browser, you may want to print this page so you can follow along easier.

Note: To perform any of the following tasks, you must login first (if you haven't already).  The login page is available here.

 

These instructions assume you are familiar with the "Welcome User" box that appears on the top right of most pages when you are logged in:

 

Important options within the "Welcome User" box are "Submit Content" which you can click and create all types of content and "Account Settings" where you can edit all of your account details (picture, interests, etc.)

 

Our user manual is divided into the following sections:

 

 

Writing Your "About My Practice" Information Page

  • This is the first task you should perform as you will not appear in our directory until this page is properly filled out.  It is also very important for you to keep this page up to date.
  • To start, you can click on the "Submit Content" link on the "Welcome User" bar at the top right above the main menu. Or by clicking here.  Then, click on the "About My Practice" link. Here you can fill out details about your practice in as much or as little detail as appropriate.
  • Note: you are only allowed to create one "About My Practice" page.  To make changes after you have saved it you can go to the page and click on the "Edit" tab that appears at the top of the about my practice page when you are logged in.
  • General Editor Help:

  • The picture above shows the toolbar that appears when entering/editing information.  While you will be familiar with most of the buttons (such as Bold, Italics, Indent, etc.) as they are the same as in your word processor - there are a few that are not as obvious:
    • Inserting Images in our editor is very simple (note:  there are different steps below for uploading your profile picture). Just press the Image:Image.gif button on the toolbar. A popup window called "Image Properties" will appear.  Then click on "browse server".  The screen that follows will have all the pictures you have previously uploaded (so you can use them in multiple documents).  To upload an image from your computer, click on the "Choose" button near the bottom of the page.  This will allow you to choose an image from your computer.  Once you select one, click "Upload".  You will then see the image in the listing of images as well as in the viewing screen - to select that image click on the "add" button next to the image and then "ok" on the image properties screen.  You can choose other options within that screen (or change them by right clicking on an image and selecting properties) such as align right (so your text wraps around the image), etc.
  • To insert a link to your personal website, other documents on the web, an email address, or other information, first highlight the link text in your document then press the Image:Link.gif button on the toolbar. A popup window called "Link" will appear.  Fill in the information for the link and click "Ok".  To edit an existing link in your document, hold your mouse over the text with the link then right-click and choose edit link.
  • Another option which isn't obvious to new users is the "paste as text" button.  This is next to the paste button, and looks like  Image:Pastetext.gif.  This is a useful option for pasting in text from word processors and/or other websites so only the text is copied (not the html or other codes from a word processor for example).  In general, this is the best function to use for pasting text from other websites or documents.
  • For more help with our editor (a commonly used one on the internet) you can view the user's manual online.

Editing Your User Profile (Upload A Picture To Your Profile, Enable Email Contact, Etc.)

 

  • After you have logged in you can click on the "Account Settings" link underneath the "Welcome User" bar at the top to be taken to your profile.  To change any of the information, click on the "edit" tab.

    Under "Picture" you can browse to a picture and choose it to be shown on your user profile.  Just browse to the picture you want to use, click on ok, then save your user profile page by clicking "submit" at the bottom.  The maximum picture size is 85x85 pixels, our system should resize your picture automatically.  If you want to do it yourself, you can resize your picture online at this website.

    Under "Contact Settings" you should (strongly recommended) enable the personal contact form (on by default). This will allow visitors to contact you via our site.  Important Note:  You should be certain to set any spam filters you may have to allow all mail from "@yinyanghouse.com" otherwise you may miss potential clients contacting you via our site.

    You can also change your password, set your timezone and change your location/interest information that you filled in when you registered by clicking on the "My Location and Interest Level" tab along the top (below the edit tab).

Keeping Your Listing For Free - Our "Userpoints" System

We reward our members who actively contribute to our site with "userpoints." Obtain 40 userpoints and you will automatically have a one year extension added to your membership for free. All we ask is that your contributions are useful to our readers (i.e. not just made to earn a point...). The following describes how points are granted:

  • (3) For a full-length article
  • (3) For a case study
  • (1) For forum posts, comments, news items and/or events related to your practice.

You can see how many userpoints you have earned by looking in the contributors block that appears on the top right of the side bar when you are logged in.

Submitting Full-Length Content To Our Site

 

  • To start submitting content, you can click on the "Submit Content" link on the top right "Welcome User" box below your username. Or by clicking here.

    Click on the "practitioner article" link. Here you can enter a full-length article including attached documents (pdf's, powerpoint slides, images, etc.). In order for your article to appear in the correct sections of our site, please choose the appropriate grouping from the drop-down box. "General-*" articles are those of interest to the majority of our readers and "Theory-*" are those which may require specialized knowledge - you can decide what is best.
     
  • Please do not include your practice information in every posting, it will be displayed next to and below every posting that you make automatically.  Any practice information within the article will be removed.

Submitting Case Studies To Our Site

 

  • To start submitting content, you can click on the "Submit Content" link on the top right "Welcome User" box below your username. Or by clicking here.

    Click on the "case studies" link.
     
  • Please do not include your practice information in every posting, it will be displayed next to and below every posting that you make automatically.  Any practice information within the article will be removed.

Submitting News Items Related To Your Practice

 

  • News items are shorter articles generally related to your practice, whereas full-length articles are longer and of more general/theoretical interest. An example of a news item would be - you recently gave a talk at an event and would like to upload your powerpoint presentation for people to view.
     
  • To start submitting content, you can click on the "create content" link on the right side bar below your username. Or by clicking here.

    Click on the "Practitioner Member News Submissions" link.

Submitting Upcoming Events Related To Your Practice

 

  • Upcoming Event items will be removed from our site 1 month after you have posted this event. This is for upcoming events related to your practice or other events you want to raise awareness of.
  • To start submitting content, you can click on the "Submit Content" link on the top right "Welcome User" box below your username. Or by clicking here.

    Click on the "Practitioner Upcoming Events" link.

Participation In Our Discussion Forums

 

  • Our forum is accessible by clicking on the "forums" link along the top menu, or by clicking here. To post a new topic, click on "Post New Forum Topic" and choose the appropriate forum to post within. To reply or comment to another forum posting, you will see the "Have Your Say" box loaded below the post.  You can simply type your reply in here and click submit.

Having Other Issues

 

  • Most technical problems with our site are caused by old versions of certain web browsers (such as IE version 6 and below) and/or various web pop-up blocking software. For web browser issues you should upgrade to the latest version of your web browser or download Firefox which is a good web browser that works with all aspects of our site. If web security software is causing an issue, disable it for our site.  If there is anything else that isn't working the way you would expect, please ask us.

We hope these instructions are helpful for you to fully utilize our site. If you have any questions, feel free to Contact Us.