About to redesign entire site

[ljd]

Hi

We've had an actinic site for to sell our books for about a year now (www.luath.co.uk). But now we want to do several things to imrpove sales:
- Get rid of the extended info popups because google isn't finding them, and do the "thumbnails" thing suggested in the advanced user guide
- work out a way of collecting more information from customers
- set up special offers, 3 for 2, that sort of thing
- add lots of non-sales related pages, specifically about our customers

All of this is going to require a significant redesign (don't think my boss realises how much work it is...). Anyhoo, while this is all being tested and developed, is it safe to keep our existing site at www.luath.co.uk and create the new one at www.luath.co.uk/testing/ ? Any advice on this sort of thing?

Ta very much

LJD

[Darren]

new one at www.luath.co.uk/testing/ ? Any advice on this sort of thing?

That sounds good - so long as you have enough webspace of course!

Don't forget to use a different script ID number in Advanced | Network setup if you plan to use the same cgi-bin as your 'real store'.

Alternatively, why not set up a local server on your machine, (great for quick upload speeds). :)
More info on that can be found in our Advanced User Guide (http://www.actinicdownloads.com/docs/user_guides/advancedguide_6.zip)

[NormanRouxel]

Darrens suggestion about a local test server is the most efficient way to go unless you have a need for people outside to see your work in progress.


Norman

[fleetwood]

I have been trying to work out how best to set up a testbed site to try out new ideas without disrupting our live site. You guys have done it again, and come up with a solution.
Whilst I have developed our site to date, I must admit to some ignorance as to how the server side operations work.
I am willing to get my hands dirty, and am looking through the advance user guide as suggested. As a starter, am I supposed to be reading through 'server configuration' (which looks daunting at first glance), or the later chapter on 'setting up a standalone demo', and is 'setting up your own local server' as suggested, a reasonably straight forward process?

[fleetwood]

I have been trying to work out how best to set up a testbed site to try out new ideas without disrupting our live site. You guys have done it again, and come up with a solution.
Whilst I have developed our site to date, I must admit to some ignorance as to how the server side operations work.
I am willing to get my hands dirty, and am looking through the advance user guide as suggested. As a starter, am I supposed to be reading through 'server configuration' (which looks daunting at first glance), or the later chapter on 'setting up a standalone demo', and is 'setting up your own local server' as suggested, a reasonably straight forward process?

[NormanRouxel]

Fleetwood:-

Just read through the Standalone Server stuff as that's all that's needed to get a local server up and running. Apache comes in two versions. I usually use the 1.3 version of Apache when doing this (I think 1.3.29 is the most recent).

LJD:-

Hey! You're in Edinburgh like me. If you need a hand, just e-mail me and I'll be happy to pop in.

Norman

[pinbrook_nick]

We use the following for local testing (they are all free :)) :

Apache for Windows:
Win32 Binary (MSI Installer):
http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi

Abyss Web Server:
http://www.aprelium.com/abyssws/

Pablo's FTP Server:
You get a choice of FTP Server, or Service for NT/2K/XP. Either works fine.
http://www.pablovandermeer.nl/projects.html


I had some problems with the installer for Apache, but just ran the unzip in the end, which worked. You need to follow instructions on http://www.aprelium.com/abyssws/perl.html to get perl configured on the web server.

It all takes a bit of playing around, but once working, uploads to your test server are dog fast!

Make sure you untick Use Passive FTP transfers, as if you don't, uploads will crawl. Here is my path to perl as an example:
/perl/bin/perl.exe

Good luck! ;)

[NormanRouxel]

LJD just posted that Google wouldn't index his popup pages
(he was using text links).

This is fair enough as they're accessed via JavaScript URL's and Google can't follow that.

I had a look at the popup code and found that by changing the Design / Text -1 / 2175 from

javascript:ShowPopUp('%s',%s,%s);

Which generates spider unhelpful code like

<A HREF="javascript:ShowPopUp('info%5f7%2ehtml',400,400);">Click here for larger image...</A>

to

%s" onclick="ShowPopUp(this.href,%s,%s);return false;

then we'd generate

<A HREF="info%5f7%2ehtml" onclick="ShowPopUp(this.href,400,400);return false;">Click here for larger image...</A>


which should do the job as we now have a normal <A..> tag with a spider friendly URL.
The JavaScript popup still works and the main page shouldn't change
(to the popup URL) as we return false. Even better if your customer didn't have a JavaScript browser
they'd still get to the popup page.

Notes: This works on popups using Display By: "Clicking Product Image" and "Text Link" but you
should not use "Extended Info Button".

Tested with IE6, Netscape 7 and Opera 6.

Bugs. It seems to fail on IE with NorCascade installed (but is fine on Opera and Netscape).
The simple solution would be not to use this patch or use NorTree instead.

Norman

[fleetwood]

Norman & Nick (do you guys ever sleep?!) - thanks for the advice - will get to work on it