Dialogue set-up requirements

Preparing your Dialogue for launch is a two-stage process:

1) Deployment: the term we use for the technical aspects of setting up your Dialogue instance; and

2) Preparation: the things you need to do after deployment to get your Dialogue instance ready to go live to the public. 


Stage 1 - Deploying your Dialogue

There are three technical items we need from you in order to actually put your Dialogue onto the internet. Please gather these and email them to your customer success manager.

  1. The URL
  2. A contact email address
  3. A logo

You also have customisation options for:

  1. Final theme development
  2. Twitter hashtag

1) The URL

Each Dialogue instance has its own web address (URL) and there are two options: 

i. A dialogue-app.com web address e.g. orgname.dialogue-app.com - you simply need to choose the 'orgname' part of this. Dialogue-app.com domains have SSL applied to them for security. 

ii. Your own custom URL e.g. orgname.gov.xx We will purchase an SSL certificate and will apply this for you. If you would like this type of URL you'll need to ask your technical team to register your choice of (sub)domain and create a CNAME record using a CNAME address we provide. A CNAME record is the technical name for something on our web server that points to another location. Please see our article explaining setting up a DNS CNAME record.


 2) A contact email address

You will need to supply us with an email address to use for correspondence that comes from your Dialogue instance. When a user registers on your Dialogue, all replies to the registration email message will go to this address. For further information on how site emails work in Dialogue, we'd recommend reading 'email notifications in Dialogue'.


 3) A logo

You need to supply us with your organisation’s logo or branding to appear at the top of your Dialogue instance. High-quality, large logos will allow us to scale for retina screens. If this isn't possible then a maximum 70px by 350px logo would be great. You may change the logo at a later stage. 


 4) Final theme development

The following aspects of Dialogue can also be customised depending on your requirements:

  • Background/button colour - requires both a light and dark shade (web friendly) - and text colour (web friendly), we will check these for accessibility.
  • Banner image: ideal dimensions are approx 2000px wide by 2,200px or larger, to help us to scale this for your site.

 5) Twitter hashtag (optional)

Dialogue allows your respondents to share their ideas directly on Twitter.  We can set your hashtag message to something unique to your organisation or campaign.  If required we can also add a widget to your Dialogue site that displays tweets from your organisation's Twitter account.

However please note that in order to provide this functionality, the "catch" with these social media widgets is that they also add cookies to the site allowing Twitter to track your visitors.


A note about SSL certificates:

You don't need to provide an SSL certificate, we will organise and purchase one on your behalf. We will need to know your Dialogue site's URL (see item 1 above) prior to this taking place. Learn more about SSL certificates.



Stage 2 - preparing to go live to the public

Once we've deployed your Dialogue, we'll let you know so you can start preparing your Dialogue to go live to the public. The following article details how to get your Dialogue ready for public launch in five easy steps.