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How do I hand over a design to a client?

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    How do I hand over a design to a client?

    The easiest way to hand over an entire design to a client is via a standard 'Site Snapshot'. This is a single file that includes all the products, sections, Site Options and Business Settings, together with the entire Library. So when customers import this snapshot they will essentially have a clone of your installation.

    There are two ways to create snapshots:

    ·'File | Snapshot | Export Site' - this zips up the entire current Actinic site into a single *.acd file – but doesn't give you any options about controlling how this file will be imported by the client.

    ·'Design | Deploy Site Snapshot' ('Designer' only) – this does the same as a standard snapshot, but gives you a few further options about how the customer imports the snapshots.

    By de-selecting 'All Orders' you can avoid the possibility of the client accidentally overwriting their order history, and the options at the bottom mean you can close off access to certain areas of the software automatically.

    If you don't want to overwrite any of the products and sections that the customer has, and you only want to supply a new design, then you need to use a 'Partial Site Design' via 'Designer | Deploy Partial Site Design'.

    This is essentially a snapshot that only contains the library elements – it doesn't contain anything else. You can keep clicking 'Next' on the wizard to send the client the entire library. When a customer imports this, it will update their design, but leave the products and sections in place.

    The thing to watch out for though is that this partial site design will contain layout selectors, and when you import a new layout selector it resets all instances of that layout selector within the Content Tree back to the 'Initial Value' - which is usually 'Use Parent'. So what it means is that any products/sections that need a setting other than the default 'Top Level Value' set in the library need to be manually set after the import.

    The 'Partial Site Design' is most useful to send your clients the occasional layout or variable to fix or update their design. You can click the 'Select None' button on any panel of the wizard and then select just the layouts/variables/conditions etc. that you want the customer to receive.
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