main site & shop

[murano-silver]

Hi All
After much help from Actinic tech support and lurking in this forum my shop www.murano-silver.com is at last up and running (thanks!). I'm really pleased with the ease of use and will be buying the catalogue version of the shop (as a new business & a sideline, it's all I can budget for) however I want to optimise the site by adding lots of pages with useful content for visitors.
e.g. History of Silver, Making Jewellery, Information on Gemstones, Ethical Information, Nickel Allergy Advice etc.

The standard Actinic pages dont seem to allow a lot of flexibility for this. I am fairly familiar with dreamweaver but only on a "play as we go along" basis.
Ideally I'd like to end up with a main site looking something like this www.network-server-suite.com (which launched this week).
The site was done for my "day-job". I handled the content optimisation etc and we subcontracted the navigation system & the main images.

Is there a reccomendation you'd make for this? I can either use my www.murano-silver.co.uk for the main site then link to the .com for the shop or (if it's possible) put it all in one place with the shop index page becoming www.murano-silver.com/shop

Any reccomendations?
Thanks for all your help :)
Nicola

[anf1y]

Is what I've done any help? I used fragments for info. pages... If you got to http://www.treatmentgels.co.uk/acatalog/shop.html and select "Especially for Aromatherapists" at the bottom, you get to info. pages. (Have yet to make images clickable - it's on the to-do list)

Anf

[aliscot]

Hi Nicola

I've just looked through your site, along with my daughter (aged 16). We both loved it, in particular the image on your Home page. My daughter, who is probably in your target market, said that she would definitely buy from your site. The products are lovely, well priced and the layout of the site is nice and simple to navigate. However, there were a couple of things that we would comment upon. If all the photos were the same size, it would have more impact. We both felt that you should put something upfront about the delivery costs, and also there is a spelling mistake on the 'About Silver' page in the second paragraph. Also, some text is missing from your 'shipping' and 'delivery' sections within Terms and Conditions. Well done and good luck! :)

Ali (and Caroline)

http://www.hificablesandaccessories.co.uk

[murano-silver]

Thanks Ali (and Caroline)
yes it's up but there are a few things that i have to correct. :)
I hepled with this site www.smartsrus.com
The design wass up to them, i helped with optimisation & we put a shop in on a "shop" button.
It seems to work quite well (I got them from no-where to the top 1-3 for all their key areas) & I was thinking of replicating this strategy for best of both worlds regarding SEO & SEM work :)

Wondered if anyone had some suggestions.
The fragments is useful but doesn't really have the flexibility I need
(maybe if i forked out for deleloper "gulp")

Nic

www.murano-silver.com

[murano-silver]

P.S. I really liked the http://www.treatmentgels.co.uk/ site
(link didn't work but got to it anyway)
Was this done in catalogue or did you get developer?

[anf1y]

Now I've got a problem... why didn't the link work? I know - Norman suggested I change the "shop" to "index"... back to the drawing board! I used catalog - only thing I would like from Developer is coupons for trade customers, but don't have the traffic from them to warrant the extra expense.
Anf

[Nadeem]

Hi Nicola

Is there a reccomendation you'd make for this? I can either use my www.murano-silver.co.uk for the main site then link to the .com for the shop or (if it's possible) put it all in one place with the shop index page becoming www.murano-silver.com/shop
Do you mean you would like to rename the /acatalog/ folder to be /shop/ so the website would be http://www.domain.com/shop/ instead of http://www.domain.com/acatalog/? This can be done but its not supported by Actinic.
Have a look at the following thread. (http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=1549)

Kind Regards

[murano-silver]

Thanks for that :)
Looks a bit complicated though......
It wasn't that complicated on the smartsrus site (or maytbe it was, can't remember how we did it)

Hmmmmm - really need more flexibility on the non- shop pages.

[Jenny]

You can do a lot with the brochure fragment layouts. Take a basic one, save it as a new name, code using dreamweaver what you want that fragment details to look like, set layout to new layout name and there you go. It copies in all from that file and hey more control!
Jenny

[pinbrook]

You can use Dreamweaver to create your extra pages, all you then do is create a link from where you want the link to be in catalog back to the dreamweaver page and visaversa. I'd advise creating a template so you can ensure all pages have the same layout

This will get round the inflexibility of the brochure fragemnts.

this is how we built www.surf-wax.co.uk

[murano-silver]

Hi Pinbrook
I LOOOOVE the surf wax site - Is the index page part of actinic or is it independant of it?

[pinbrook]

http://www.surf-wax.co.uk/index.htm is DW template
http://www.surf-wax.co.uk/acatalog/index.html is Actinic template