CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Online membership signup and renewal is done via Online Contribution pages - with the "Membership Block" enabled and configured. So it sounds like you've done what you want to do.

A few CiviCRM "definitions" might help clarify for you:
- Contact = any person, organization or household in your CiviCRM database
- Member = a Contact who has one or more CiviMember memberships linked to their contact record
- Contributor = a Contact who has one or more Contributions linked to their contact record
- User = a person with a  CMS account (Drupal or Joomla) on your site. When CiviCRM is enabled, it creates a linked contact record for each user.

HTH,
dave

Contacts "get" memberships by:
1. A staff member in your organization navigates to that person's contact record and clicks the "Memberships" tab and then "New Membership" - and creates the membership for that contact.

2. You configure an Online Contribution page which includes the Membership block - and then people come to that page and signup (this is the "self-service" method). Assuming the membership are not FREE - this approach will charge their credit card, create a contact record for them (if they're not already in your DB), create a contribution record linked to their contact record, and create a membership record linked to their contact record.

You can alway see who has what memberships from CiviMember >> Find Members or using the Advanced Search - Memberships pane.

Given all the questions you've been asking here - I would encourage / ask that you check out the existing documentation on the wiki for these topics and add explanations that would have helped you figure this stuff out / understand things better.