From Meh to Wow 🤩 Transform Your Dubsado Branding with White Labeling
Welcome to We Make Systems Sexy! Hi there. Ashley here with We Make Systems Sexy. Today let’s talk about a cool feature of Dubsado.
Dubsado has an endless amount of pretty neat features, which is why we love it.
If you are already a Dubsado user or it’s something that you’re thinking about using, you may have noticed that when you share a form (or maybe even when someone who uses Dubsado already has shared a form with you) it says, “hello, a whole bunch of letters and numbers” in the link.
It doesn’t look very pretty.
Well, no worries because within Dubsado you can do something called white labeling. White labeling is just a fancy way of saying that you can actually customize your Dubsado URLs within Dubsado and they could actually look branded to your website or your domain name.
Even if you don’t have a website set up, if you have a domain purchased, you can make that work too. So obviously, if you do not have a custom domain… again, you don’t have to have a website built out. You just have to actually have a custom domain that you own.
For example, mine is wemakesystemssexy.com – that’s my custom domain (I do have a website though). But if you don’t, you would need to go and actually purchase a domain first and host it. So most companies, you can go through something like Bluehost or Hostgator or any other myriad of hosting platforms.
That’s gonna be your first prerequisite if you don’t already have a domain set up.
What white labeling is going to accomplish for you is instead of it saying “hello.Dubsado.com blah blah blah” it might say “hello.yourdomainname.com”, for example.
Whatever you actually decide for that first word to be can be “portal” or “hello” or whatever you want that to be because it’s customizable. Now as I mentioned, there are so many different hosting companies. So there’s not 1 single set of instructions for how to actually set up the custom URL mapping.
If you get stuck at any place, then you might wanna actually reach out to whoever your hosting company is for exact details. Basically, what you’re going to have to do is create a CNAME within your hosting company. If you already set up the DNS record to actually verify your outgoing email in Dubsado then you have probably already been a bit through this process in the back end of your hosting platform.
You just will need to decide what that CNAME is going to be, what you want it to look like, and that’s gonna be that first part of the URL just like we mentioned, it can say, “hello” or “portal” or whatever first word you want that to say. And you can be creative if you want, but those are just some examples.
To do this, you would log in to your hosting platform, and locate the DNS settings. Those should be easy to find found in the CPanel or maybe a settings area that’s more advanced. But usually, it’s gonna be somewhere on 1 of those front pages DNS settings, CPanel, or something along those lines.
From here is where it gets a little bit more technical because you’ll need to add a new DNS record and select the type as the CNAME.
And here’s where it can kind of differ from host to host, but it might be something called, “host” or “record name”, etcetera where you can actually enter that first word that you chose “Hello” or “portal” or whatever you want that word to be.
And then there’s going to be specifics according to each hosting platform, in the data or value field, you just need to actually enter SSL.Dubsado.com. And that’s where it’s going to be pointing that record to, so that it connects up with Dubsado.
Now if this is all feeling a little bit too technical, it’s very likely that your platform will actually help you to run through these steps if you just tell them what you’re trying to do.
A lot of the stuff on the back end of my website (because I am not a web designer or developer), I will have my hosting platform help me through those pieces. Just because it can be a little overwhelming if you feel like, “oh my goodness. I’m probably gonna mess something if I continue here”. It really isn’t too complicated but if you’re feeling that way, you can reach out to support and they can help you get this taken care quickly.
Now once you get all of this set up on that end, it might take up to 72 hours to actually become active. It usually doesn’t take even that long, though. It’s usually pretty quick, but just give it a little bit of time and remember it can be normal if you’re not seeing that change right away.
Once you’ve done that part in the back end of the hosting platform:
- go back into your Dubsado account
- go into settings under domain names
- you’re going to see under custom URL mapping where you can actually verify that URL
- you’re going to actually enter what you created within that CNAME record
- then just click verify
Once the little green icon pops up on the page right there in Dubsado, then that’s how you know that it is connected and registered. If you see any errors pop up, then I would definitely check with your host and see if they can help you through the technical part of it.
But basically, in a nutshell, this is how you’re going to white label or customize your Dubsado URLs so that when you send out a proposal or any other kind of form, it’s going to look like it’s connected to your website. Because we love when things are branded to us in our business.
We offer a customized Dubsado VIP Day, which basically is your Dubsado account completely set up in just one day with some workflows included.
If you want more details about what that actually looks like, you can view that information here.
If you already are using Dubsado but you feel like you’re not using it to the fullest, please contact us and we would love to help you with a Dubsado audit to see what you’re doing well and what you can improve on to make sure you’re getting the most benefit out of this platform.
