With the aim of giving you more control when creating additional brands on your helpdesk, we have created additional methods to create a new brand that has been released in Deskpro 2019.1. You now have the ability to choose between creating a helpdesk with a custom URL, or keeping the same main URL and using slugs to access the additional brands that will be used with your main URL.

What is a URL Slug?

This is defined in many ways, however in this context, it would relate to the "User Friendly" part of a website address to the right of the actual domain name. ie. example.com/brand-slug-2

Previously, you would have only been able to specify an entire domain or sub-domain for each brand. ie helpdesk.example.com and internal.example.com. As we continued to expand our multibrand capabilities - and have allowed for yet another feature (feedback) to be branded, the demand to deploy multibrands in a more fluid and personal way became apparent.

Where previously you would have needed to register a new domain name to properly access a new brand, our client base let us know these were difficult to seek the approval of, or hard to justify in a larger company, sometimes incurring costs with upstream providers. We have therefore removed this limitation, allowing customers to set up "Brand Slugs" without the need to set up a new sub domain. example.com/b/internal-hd1, example.com/b/ext-2, example.com/b/hrdesk3 - and so on.

Why would you ever use a URL Slug?

One reason would be to make your URL's more user friendly. The previous system would auto-generate a "preview" link (/brand-1, /brand-2) which the user had no control over. When accessing these URLs', visitors would have no context as to what the page was related to.

Moving on from that, this would increase your SEO - when search engines index pages, they look at the text in the URL to assist with rankings. If your URL is (example.com/b/internal-hr-support) - an employee will have more luck finding the correct support desk through a search engine.

Finally, as previously outlined, this practice prevents exhausting actual sub-domains or additional domains to make use of the new multibrand features, which was becoming time consuming and costly for the IT departments.

How to get started:

A screenshot of the new Brand Setup page can be seen below and there is the simple ‘Helpdesk slug’ option which is all that needs to be entered in order to use this feature. As you are updating the details you can also use the newly added ‘View brand portal’ button to easily preview and check that everything is correct.

Once you have entered your brand portals details into the setup, make sure to tick the option to Enable Portal if you wish to have the portal available for this brand. Once this is ticked, you will be given the same portal options that are available on the Default brand, and you can set this up to match your brand's needs:

The URL to access a brand through its slug URL is always: support.example.com/b/slug