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Getting content from V12 site into new responsive design in 2016 -or other way round!

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    Getting content from V12 site into new responsive design in 2016 -or other way round!

    I'm hoping someone can help me get myself out the technical hole I'm in....

    Some time ago I developed a website in Sellerdeck v12 for a good friend. I'm not a web designer or developer by background, though I have done some programming and in the dim and distant past I set up and managed a university Web team from whom I gained some experience of HTML and general design principles. I managed to produce something reasonable which has been selling products for about 4 years now. When Sellerdeck 2014 came out I began the process of converting the site to be responsive.

    Due to prolonged periods of depression the process took longer than I had hoped and I am now finally nearing the point of completion of a reasonable responsive design in v16. I have evolved the site through several versions of Sellerdeck and have extensively customised the design to meet the needs of my friend. This has involved modifying both layouts and CSS (along with a small amount of Javascript). I carried across the content as it was at the time I started but in the intervening period quite a lot of new products have been added to the old site. I realise this is not an ideal situation but since I was unable to work for some of the time there was not much that could have been done differently.

    I have had conversations over the phone and by email with technical support, some of which have been passed on to the Seller development team I think, which resulted in a set of instructions to bring the content from the current site into the current version of the software and apply my new design to it (attached). I have to say I wasn't entirely surprised when this did not work as suggested. Despite the best efforts of one of the technical support guys and several remote sessions the resulting site was a bit of a mess to say the least! I eventually got a call from someone to confirm that what I needed was beyond the remit and expertise of the support team and a suggestion that I call the sales team. I did so this morning and eventually got through this afternoon, but they were unable to help either.

    This is where I point out that my work is essentially voluntary.

    I am frustrated that I have wasted some considerable time and effort on something that was never going to work. This is real time spent with emails, phone calls and remote sessions as well as less easily quantifiable time spent waiting for replies. Unfortunately the support guy had uploaded to my test site and when I tried to revert to the last working snapshot I got some errors pertaining to mismatched username and password. My friend lives some distance from me and unfortunately the situation came to a head the day was at his offices so I was unable to use the time I had set aside to discuss final design issues with him as I could not demonstrate anything adequately resembling the new design.

    I am also frustrated as I'm not completely without technical expertise and know that some degree of importing and exporting of content can be done via files (hierarchical or flat). I worked quite a bit with spreadsheets and directory listings on the v12 site as it started out based on a set of folders full of small and large images with relevant file names for the products. It would take me some time to get my head round the differences between the versions and the added complexities of the responsive design export but someone with more experience with the software would probably be able to do it much quicker.

    Had I been told from the outset that I was asking the impossible I would have added the new products in a more manual manner and it would have been done by now. We're talking small business not multi-national here!

    I was hoping there would be someone on the forum who might be able to help in some way.

    The old (and currently operational) site is at
    http://www.origins-photography.co.uk/

    and a copy of the development site is at
    http://origins-photography.co.uk/aca...ress/shop.html

    In desperation.

    Debbie
    Attached Files

    #2
    Contact me tomorrow Debbie. I'm currently taking a V10 site to V2106 and importing a design done in V2014. It is all perfectly possible.
    Elysium:Online - Official Accredited SellerDeck Partner
    SellerDeck Design, Build, Hosting & Promotion
    Based in rural Northants

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