Which links are meant to be public

Open Public links in your dashboard. It lists the only pages meant to be posted on your website, in your email signature and on your social profiles: your booking page, a booking page for each consultant on your team, your intake form, your Active File Review page, and the page of each upcoming event. Every other link the app creates is for one person and one matter, and is sent to them directly — never post those.

Each link has a Copy button. Most firms put the booking page behind a button that says what it does, such as "Book a paid consultation", on their Contact page and in every email signature. Say what the link is; "Click here" tells the reader nothing.

Open Public links

Showing these pages at your own web address

If your firm has a website on file under Settings, you can show every public page at an address on your own domain — for example clients.yourfirm.ca instead of rcicapp.ca/book/yourfirm. The address bar then carries your firm's name, and so do the links in the emails your clients receive. This is available to every firm with a website on file, on every plan.

Choose one name under your domain. The domain itself (yourfirm.ca) and www are where your website lives, so they are refused; clients, book and portal are the names most firms pick. Only the firm's owner can connect or disconnect an address.

The one record to add at your registrar

After you press Connect, the page shows a small table: a CNAME record with the exact name and value to add at your domain registrar (the company you bought your domain from — GoDaddy, Namecheap, Google Domains, Rebel, your web host). Sign in there, open the DNS settings for your domain, add a new record of type CNAME, paste the name and the value exactly as shown, and save. Use the Copy buttons; a single mistyped character is the most common reason a connection stays waiting.

Then press Check now. Registrars can take anywhere from a minute to 48 hours to publish a new record, and the page checks again on its own every 15 minutes, so you can close it and come back. When the record is found the status changes to Live, the certificate is issued for you, and every link on the page switches to your address.

• Some registrars add your domain to the name automatically: if the table says clients.yourfirm.ca and the registrar's form already ends in .yourfirm.ca, type only clients.

• If a second row of type TXT appears, the same name is attached to another website somewhere, and the TXT record is how you prove the name is yours. Add it beside the CNAME; it does no harm to leave it in place afterwards.

• If nothing is found after seven days the attempt closes on its own. Disconnect, add the record, and connect again — nothing is lost.

What changes, and what stays

Once the address is live, your public pages and every link in your clients' emails use it. Links you posted earlier keep working: rcicapp.ca addresses forward to your address on their own, so there is nothing to update on your website or in old emails. Your team still signs in at rcicapp.ca — the dashboard is never shown under your domain.

A short "Powered by RCIC App" line and the privacy links stay at the foot of every page, on purpose. Your clients' information is held by RCIC App on your behalf, and the page says so, beside the notice that RCIC App is independent of the College. Your name, logo and colours are what the page leads with; the address changes the address, not the design — that comes from Booking page design.

If you ever disconnect the address, every link returns to rcicapp.ca on its own, again with nothing to change on your side. If the record at your registrar is removed later, the page shows Something is wrong with the reason; fix the record and press Check now to go live again.

What not to do

Do not mirror or proxy these pages. Some web hosts offer to show another site under your address by copying it; that breaks payments and sign-in in ways neither you nor we can see, and it is not supported. Connecting your own address gives the same result and is supported. Do not place the booking page inside a frame on your site either: card payments cannot complete inside a frame, and sign-in fails on Safari and on iPhones. Link to it, or connect your address.