BEFORE YOU READ THIS:

If you are not a technical person or don't want to deal with changing your website's DNS, please skip all of this and check out this tutorial on setting up a Secure Domain (much easier). 

This article goes into the technical details of setting up a CNAME, which is a subdomain on your domain that points to Táve. It looks like "clients.example-studio.com" and will point to your Tave client-facing pages. The secure domain doesn't require any extra configuration outside of Táve and looks something like "example-studio.tave.com".

What is a CNAME anyway?

A CNAME is a subdomain that points to another domain or subdomain.  The most common of these is "www" which is normally an alias of the root domain. 

For a technical example of how this looks, let's take www.tave.com for example.  If we lookup this, we will get:

www.tave.com. 600 IN CNAME tave.com.

This is saying that www.tave.com is an alias of tave.com for at least the next 600 seconds, so use tave.com's IP address for resolving this domain.  This allows the browser to show www.tave.com, even though they are really going to the IP address of tave.com.

Why use a custom domain?

It is all about branding.  You want to keep your brand in front of the customer as much as possible.  Setting up a custom domain allows you to do that.  Let's take a look at Karen's contact form custom domain for her "Karen Lisa Artistic Photography" brand.  If you go to clients.karenlisa.com, you can see the custom domain in action.  If we lookup this using a DNS test tool, you will see the following:

clients.karenlisa.com. 3600 IN CNAME clientaccess.tave.com.
clientaccess.tave.com. 600 IN CNAME my.tave.com.
my.tave.com. 60 IN A 75.101.166.200

This may look a little complicated at first, so let's take it line by line.  

The first line is really the one that matters and shows that Karen set up clients.karenlisa.com as an alias of clientaccess.tave.com (this is the domain used to handle client access in T3).  So when you type in clients.karenlisa.com into the browser, your brower goes and tries to find the IP address of the server to connect to.  It first sees that clients.karenlisa.com is an alias of clientaccess.tave.com.

The browser then goes and looks up clientaccess.tave.com and sees that it is an alias of my.tave.com.

The browser then goes and looks up my.tave.com and finally locates an IP address (75.101.166.200 in this case).  

Your client or any web surfer who comes across your custom domain won't know that they are actually talking to Táve based on the URL.

How to set up your custom domain's CNAME record

Each DNS/Hosting provider has different interfaces for managing DNS.  You'll want to provide them or your webmaster with the following information:

• Name: (a subdomain of your website)
• Record Type: CNAME or Alias
• Value: clientaccess.tave.com
• TTL: 3600 seconds (or less)

For Karen, who uses Amazon's Route53 DNS service, she could use the information above to create the CNAME using their interface for her clients.karenlisa.com custom domain. Doing so looks like this (each DNS provider will be different):

Notice that the subdomain ends in a period. Some DNS interfaces will hide this from you while others wil require you to include that ending period on both the Name and Value, just one of them (as Amazon does), or neither.

The best thing to do is too look at how it handles other CNAME records, such as www, and mimic the format used there. 

Now the Táve side of things

Once you have this setup, you will need to set it up in Táve under your Brand.  We need to know that when we see this domain come into our servers, that it should be using your specific Brand.

Here is a screenshot of Karen's custom domain setup:

So, we see here that we set the custom domain to the exact same thing that we set the fully qualified domain name.  Simple enough!

What is this secure domain used for?

The secure domain is a custom subdomain of tave.com to be used for securely accepting payment over an encrypted page. We only redirect to this domain in the event that the requested page will be asking for credit card information. If you don't accept credit cards via Táve, your users should never come across this, but it's best to set up and reserve a subdomain now in case that changes in the future as we add more credit card processing options.

You should use something having to do with your brand's name instead of leaving the random value generated when you created the brand. For example, Karen picked karenlisa.tave.com as her brand is easily identifiable based on the subdomain. Common words and anything less than 5 letters are part of our reserved word list and not available for usage.