When you sign up for a SparqFest free trial, you get a SparqFest site with all of the portals. This site will transition to your live site if you decide to subscribe to SparqFest. We do not place watermarks anywhere and we do not restrict your functionality. You select your target plan and the site operates with the features of that target plan.
If you are not yet logged in (you probably are not at this point), it will ask you to login with a Google or Apple ID. Pick the authentication service of your choice.
Once you are signed in, we will ask you to agree to terms of service for both SparqFest and Stripe. The terms of service that SparqFest has with Stripe require that all festivals read and agree to the Stripe terms.
Customer Information
The next step is to provide us with the customer information we require to do business with you as someone accepting ecommerce transactions. It is absolutely critical that the country you provide us with matches the country of your bank account. In addition, when you pick a site currency in the next section, you must select the currency that matches the currency associated with your bank account. We can change this later, but you will receive an error at this point if you select something different.
We Can Accept Payments in Currencies Other Than Yours
To keep pricing simple, we accept payments from your ticket buyers in just one currency. You can pick from any of our supported currencies. The default is to accept payments in the same currency in which you get paid.
If, however, your bank account is denominated in a different currency from the one in which you'd like to accept payments in, contact us and we will configure your account with that kind of support. For the purposes of sign up, however, the currency you select should be the currency of your bank account.
Site Information
Now that we know enough about you to do business with you without getting in trouble, it's time for you to tell us about your festival. In particular, what are the basic operating parameters of your site.
The first thing is the name of the site. It can be literally anything you like, but the name of your festival is generally the right answer to this question. This value may be changed later.
If you are signing up for a custom domain, you can enter the host and domain name you want for the site. For customers just “kicking the tires”, you can leave this blank for now. We can add in a custom domain at any time.
Next is the name of your site as it will appear in your SparqFest URL. In general, this value isn't that important—yet it must be unique across all our customers. For Minnesota WebFest, we selected “mnwf” and thus got the URL “mnwf.sparqfest.live”. It's not that important because the name will either hide behind a link from your main site or you will use a custom domain. If you are opting to live with the sparqfest.live domain and want to give it out to people, you should select something short and memorable.
The next question may be a bit confusing, but if you don't understand it, there's an easy answer. In short, it's asking you what consumer protection rules you are subject to. If you are in the EU, answer “GDPR”. If you are in Canada, select “PIPEDA”. Otherwise, select “Not Regulated”. Your selection here helps determine where we host your data.
In the next dropdown, you can select a specific hosting location. The locations available to you will depend on what regulatory framework you selected. If you selected PIPEDA, for example, only Montreal will be available to you. Our recommendation is to select a location closest to your core audience.
Next, select the site currency as described above.
Finally, specify the language configuration for the site. Each site has a “primary language” as well as any number of secondary languages. See the article on "Global Content, Local Experience" to better understand the trade-off of selecting many languages versus a few. If you just want to move forward for now, however, simply select a primary language and leave the others blank. You can add other languages when you have a better feel for how a multi-lingual site works in SparqFest.
Subscription Information
The next step presents you with our current subscription plans and pricing. For now, select the subscription plan that best matches the features you want to test. You can downgrade/upgrade at any point during the trial. Just make sure to select your final plan before the trial period is up. Your site will have all of the features for the plan you select.
Our recommendation: Select the plan with the right amount of hours with judging enabled and cloud synchronization reflecting your best guess as to whether you want to leverage that feature (we strongly recommend you use this feature).
Complete the subscription and wait for your site to build.
Waiting for the Site
The next page will scare you. It says it takes 10-20 minutes for the site to build. In reality, it takes roughly 5 minutes. It will give you a timer and eventually redirect to your site once the build has completed. If you don't have time to hang around, you can close the sign-up page after you take note of your site's sparqfest.live URL. The site will be there when you come back later.
Logging In
When you come to your web site, you will see a brand new site with Sparq branding. You should now be able to login with admin access to your new site. Your 14-day clock is now ticking!