Get started setting up your storefront on the Cubby Marketing site
This article goes over the steps needed to setup your Cubby-powered storefront, and includes some tips to maximize your storefront's impact.
Create a storefront
Once you've been provided with credentials by the Cubby team, navigate to the Marketing site and login. You'll then be prompted to create a new Storefront, choose an appropriate name (such as your business or domain name) and save it.
And with that your storefront is ready to launch. You don't need to do anything else to start using Cubby components on your website, however you'll likely want to make some edits before going live.
On the left are the buttons for the main sections of the Marketing site - Content, Components and Styleguide, while on the right you'll find the Settings page. These pages control different aspects of your storefront and its a good idea to visit each to customize your clients' experience.
Edit your content
The content section allows you to add, edit and manage the content that will populate your storefront. Within it are subsections for each type of information used by the components.
Cubby recommends at the very least to upload one high-quality image for each facility in your organisation. If possible consider also uploading unique images for each pricing group within your facilities, as visual aids are proven to drive better conversion among customers.
Many fields in your content pages will be pre-filled and greyed out as information from the Cubby App is used by default. You can override any value you wish in the Marketing site and it will have no impact on the original data.
For example, if your facility is legally called Grand Canyon 512, however you prefer to show customers the simplified name Grand Canyon you can write the new name on its detail page and expect it to only change on your storefront.
Selecting a subsection from the Content page (such as Facilities) will show you a list of all available entries of that type, which allows some quick edits and bulk operations. Clicking on one will take you to its details page, where you can perform more in-depth editing.
Some content types (such as Pricing groups and Facilities) are tied to your real-world data and thus can only be published on unpublished, but not deleted or added, while other content types (such as Collections and Variants) are exclusively used within your storefront and you can create and delete them to fit your site's needs.
- At this point it is recommended that you go over all your available Facilities and Pricing groups and adjust any setting you'd like to change before going live with your storefront.
- Some of the most impactful changes are adding images to as many things as possible, adjusting names and descriptions to improve the customer experience and SEO, tagging entries to make it more convenient to later filter them both in the Marketing site and within Collections and Portfolios
- Collections are logical groupings of Pricing groups, you can create a Collection by selecting specific pricing groups to be part of it or by applying filters to it which will only include Pricing groups within certain parameters (for example only Pricing groups which are considered small). Creating several collections for each facility may help your users more quickly find what they need as they will automatically be displayed as tabs when the facility's Pricing groups are shown on the website.
- Variants are also groupings of Pricing groups, however they're instead designed to offer progressively better versions of a product to your customers. For example you could create a variant which contains three pricing groups with the same size, but with differing features. When a customer selects a product within that variant Cubby will automatically check if there are more expensive options within the variant and display them for users as alternatives.
Change component settings
The Components section of the Marketing site lets you set new defaults for all the various component you'll be using. Selecting a component from the left menu will display it's settings as well as show you a preview of how this component might look on your website.
There's nothing you need to do in this section as Cubby has set sensible defaults that get you going, however it may be worth looking through this page to become familiar with the components and their options. Additionally each component page has a snippet generator in the bottom. Expanding it will let you quickly copy the code you need to actually put this component on your page.
Customize your styleguide
The Styleguide is the heart of component styles. You can adjust colors, spacing and other features which change the look of practically all components. While the Content page allows you to fine tune the exact data your customers will see, editing the Styleguide to match your website's branding is nearly as important. While Cubby tries to set good defaults for your Styleguide, each site is unique. With some simple tweaks on this page you can make sure Cubby components don't feel like a plugin on your page, but rather a seamless part of it.
You can achieve a lot by adjusting the values on the Styleguide, however if you're after finer styling you can refer to the Advanced Styling guide.
Time to go live
With everything set up, you're ready to start using Cubby components. You can follow our guide to adding components to your site.