Do I really need Ecommerce?

[spidermansteve]

Hello all,
what a great site this is!
I wonder if someone can give me advice.
I am working on behalf of a client who current uses Actinic catalog (v6) to sell her products online - let's call this Biz1. She updates her own products. I have done a little SEO work for her so I know a bit about Actinic, only a tiny bit really. The more I read this forum, the more I realise how little I do know about Actinic.
Anyway, my client (same one) has also started a new business venture and now she would like to set up another website with a different URL to sell her new business products online via Actinic - Biz2.

Now this is where it gets a little complicated - my client would like to continue with Biz1 but just use it as a shop front site, just to display her products, not an ecommerce site anymore. She would still like to update the products herself.

I was thinking at first about having 2 licenced copies of Actinic, running on the same Pc - one for each business but then I thought - does she actually need Actinic for Biz1 if it is no longer an ecommerce site! But then I don't know of an easy way of providing the self-update facility as I am not a PHP/MYSQL expert. Perhaps Actinic already do a self-update package without the full blown ecommerce facility.

Any suggestions would be gratefully accepted.

Cheers,
Steve Anthony.

website design lancaster uk
google top 10 ranking

[compendia]

Hi,

I thjink I understand what she wants to do, though I am not sure why.

Check with Actinic but I don't think you need two copies of the software to run on the same machine. Her current site will be in a folder called site1 and I think you can create a new folder called site2, for the new business but I only run one website so have never tried it. Not sure how the uploading would work.

She could certainly keep using the actinic even if she didn't want to sell. In business settings there's an option to 'suspend' all ordering which would just leave her with a showcase, it changes the defult 'buy now' button to read 'ordering suspended' or something like that - it's a bit ugly so you might want to change it.

In each product theres a checkbox that reads 'can be ordered online' just uncheck them all this removes the add to cart button, meaning a customer can't buy anything. Then you could put an email link or phone number in your template so that people can make offline enquiries - I presume that's what she wants to do.

In the long run I think actinic would seem quite an expensive solution to having a website that doesn't sell anything, but if she knows how to use it then fair enough.

However if she'd going to move the biz1 products into biz2 then this would seem to be a different proposition to me.

Umm - not sure how helpful I've been,

[jont]

As Megan says she will need 2 copies of Actinic if she wants to use Actinic to maintain 2 sites - even if 1 is just a catalogue and not e-commerce.

The beauty of Actinic is the ease to add and ammend new products / info in a simple and easy interface - if she has no knowledge of HTML then Actinic would make sense as she has current knowledge. If she went down the HTML route she would still need a HTML editor of some type (Dreamweaver, FrontPage etc) all with associated costs. Going further you can use Contribute to maintain the site but again the cost is very high

One option as Megan says may be to link Biz 2 site through to Biz 1 and have just the one copy of Actinic to run everything on the Biz 1 site (or vice versa) - although there are implications on type of product / company etc that may not make this feasible.