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Anyone on DC do Actinic (UK)?

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iphigenie:
Hello all

In a strange twist of fate I have acquired a small wine business (yay!) and inherited a website that runs on Actinic (less yay).

Now I come from much more state of the art ecommerce projects, so am banging my head on Actinic a bit, and trying to figure out what is possible in up to date Actinic (site is quite old, so has accumulated workarounds from v6,7,8,9 etc.) and what is not possible etc. is proving quite a challenge.

All I knew from Actinic was helping get the data off it for people migrating to something else, although it's actually not a bad package within its limitations and design choices. It is frustrating to me, though.

I know some of the lovely people on this forum often supplement their software income with a bit of IT services, any of you have Actinic on your product portfolio? Might be a day's worth of review/advice/sanity checking in it, and perhaps more onwards (unless I decide to replatform)

Carol Haynes:
I tried to get to grips with Actinic for a client and absolutely hated it. In the end it was quicker to start from scratch - and cheaper!

iphigenie:
*sigh* tell me about it...

Got to move carefully on this one not lose the rankings - site might be a bit ugly and not all that good at selling as it could be (an euphemism) but it does come up in the first 3 spots in Google on a lot of its rather niche products. So I need to improve what I've got and evolve it slowly first, then replatform very carefully

Maybe I'll do a DC rebate once I have understood my margins :)

brucet:
Is there anything specific you want to do? Most things are possible once you get to grips with how the application works.

iphigenie:
Hi Bruce

Just an endless list of little things.
I'm ok with the fact that it mostly generates static pages and that I will not be able to do the dynamic clever stuff I am used to, but i would still expect to be able to use a lot of tricks to get improvements.

I have figured out some but it takes me forever, I would much rather get someone who knows the tool to go through my ideas with me, tell me whats easy/not easy, and perhaps implement some of it or point me in the right direction.

Main areas:
- product highlights etc. on the home page
- move to clean css and proper page structure
- rejig structure between text and products so people see more products (it's very content rich). I've started with content categories so I can design them differently
- in page navigation, how to
- improve search (eg: misspellings etc) without necessarily polluting the pages with <noscript> all over
- custom search forms/URLs that can search in custom variables and search results (eg: create hard coded search links)
- using block to create a "dynamic-at-upload" pages based on custom variables
- creating a nice 404 page
- being able to export, clean data, then reimport since editing in tool takes forever to switch from one product to the next

I've done a bit of it already, but it takes me forever. Current state is far from what I would like it to feel like, but is a start http://www.nickdobsonwines.co.uk/

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