Main reasons for not doing the whole site in v8 are:
1) Everything would have to go into the acatalog folder (I know, I know...); which would mean either losing the search rankings for all our existing pages, or having a stupidly long .htaccess file with literally hundreds of 301 redirects
2) There are many freeform pages, eg the FAQs, press release archive and the pages in the Resource Centre. All this content would either have to be completely rewritten; or copied page by page, as HTML, into fragments. The commercial gain from doing this would be exactly zero. All the same, if anyone thinks they could do it for us in a day, they are welcome to try, and I would be happy to pay them a fixed fee for so doing ;-)
Porting the new design into Actinic has actually been done, for the partner pages and the store, and took me less than an hour. A couple of bugs re-emerged in the store that first appeared when we upgraded it from v8.1 to v8.5 (yes, I know about that too!), we will them have fixed shortly, and the partner pages work fine AFAICS.
At some stage all the product pages will be moved into Actinic and merged with the store pages, but that probably won't happen until v9.
There are more changes to come, and the new layout will stand or fall on one thing only - whether it improves the movement of visitors through the site and increases the registration rate (OK, two things...) But obviously getting the design right is a part of that, so please keep the comments flowing
1) Everything would have to go into the acatalog folder (I know, I know...); which would mean either losing the search rankings for all our existing pages, or having a stupidly long .htaccess file with literally hundreds of 301 redirects
2) There are many freeform pages, eg the FAQs, press release archive and the pages in the Resource Centre. All this content would either have to be completely rewritten; or copied page by page, as HTML, into fragments. The commercial gain from doing this would be exactly zero. All the same, if anyone thinks they could do it for us in a day, they are welcome to try, and I would be happy to pay them a fixed fee for so doing ;-)
Porting the new design into Actinic has actually been done, for the partner pages and the store, and took me less than an hour. A couple of bugs re-emerged in the store that first appeared when we upgraded it from v8.1 to v8.5 (yes, I know about that too!), we will them have fixed shortly, and the partner pages work fine AFAICS.
At some stage all the product pages will be moved into Actinic and merged with the store pages, but that probably won't happen until v9.
There are more changes to come, and the new layout will stand or fall on one thing only - whether it improves the movement of visitors through the site and increases the registration rate (OK, two things...) But obviously getting the design right is a part of that, so please keep the comments flowing
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