Merging Sellerdeck Websites

[abbi_newbie]

Hi,

Has anyone has any experience of merging different sellerdeck website?

We would ideally like to merge some of our websites without losing the individuality of each site.

The sites have the same layout but different colour schemes etc.

What would be the best way of doing this?

Does anyone know if it is possible to have a second site sellerdeck instillation pointing at a folder on the same domain as another...

For example:

InstallSiteone.com

then another site installation pointing at:

InstallSiteone.com/SiteTwo

Any help will be greatly appreciated!

[Duncan Rounding]

You can install more than one store on a domain with a subdomain but the carts will be independent (and the cgi script numbering must be different if you're sharing the cgi-bin).

You could use either www.mydomain.com/site1 or www.site1.mydomain.com for example by setting up the network settings and hosting appropriately.

Merging the stores is a little different though. You could for example create one large store and have the colour branding change on a section by section basis. In that way there will be one cart and one set of cgi scripts required.

Are the products the same in each store? Why do you want to consolidate the stores into one main domain?

[abbi_newbie]

We want to merge the stores as we have one main site which gets most of our traffic and consolidating will improve the overall quality of our stores.

Our main store has a number of sections to it, and the sites we want to merge into it are more 'specialist' websites. Our main site being biggamehunters.co.uk

For example, our main store has a small section with some dolls houses on it, but our dolls houses website is more specialists with many more products and guides etc. (dollshouses.co.uk)

We just don't want to lose the 'individual' feel of each site as the 'dolls house' feel for example is a lot different to the look and feel of the trampoline site for example.

With some of our specialists sites, the content and look/feel is not significantly better than the main site, so in these instances we were just going to kill and redirect the old specialist sites and take any products or content that don't currently exists on the main site rather then 'merging'.

Does that answer your question? I was mainly concerned about the complexity of creating different schemes for different sections on the site - what would you say is the easiest way to achieve this? I really wanted to achieve a different landing page for each 'shop' on the main domain - but fear as we have recently done a complete redesign this would mean another big redesign?

Thanks

Abbi

[malbro]

For example, our main store has a small section with some dolls houses on it, but our dolls houses website is more specialists with many more products and guides etc. (dollshouses.co.uk)

Does that answer your question? I was mainly concerned about the complexity of creating different schemes for different sections on the site - what would you say is the easiest way to achieve this? I really wanted to achieve a different landing page for each 'shop' on the main domain - but fear as we have recently done a complete redesign this would mean another big redesign?

Thanks

Abbi

Hi

I did a similar task for a client last year who are an organic farm with a theme dedicated to selling produce who also wanted to sell other leather products but wanted a diffent feel to the site. Sellerdeck makes this very easy by allowing different overall layouts to be applied to sections.

I setup the new products in their own section and subsections with a dedicated link from the main site rather than being part of the normal site directory and then set a completely new overall layout for all pages in that section.

[abbi_newbie]

Thank you -

Could you possible clarify what you mean when you say

"...with a dedicated link from the main site rather than being part of the normal site directory"

How would you do this?

Thank again!

[malbro]

Thank you -

Could you possible clarify what you mean when you say

"...with a dedicated link from the main site rather than being part of the normal site directory"

How would you do this?

Thank again!

by default Sellerdeck includes all sections in its navigation lists, it is prossible to modify the layouts to remove selected sections from the list, but it is not a trivial task unless you understand how block if and custom variables work.

Adding a link can be done using by generating a new layout with the correct html in it or by simply adding the relvant html to an existing layout.

[abbi_newbie]

HI,

yes our site is super customised so I do understand block ifs and custom variables to a certain extent.

I'm probably going to sound really thick now - but when you say 'navigation lists' are you referring to the standard structure of the site within sellerdeck i.e. the content tree and design tree?

If you are referring to the navigation on the site - as in the side menus/top menus - we have custom hard coded menus, rather than automatically populated menus anyway so im not sure that would be an issue...

So when you talk about 'removing them from the list' are you talking about preventing them from showing up on site navigation from the users perspective? From the navigation side of thing we are probably going to need to rethink that so it is easier to get to all relevant sections, possibly with a simpler front page and more options within each section.

Our site currently has a main layout with block if's to tell it whether it is the home page - would it be possible to translate this to a new section layout so if it is the section 'home page' or landing page it will look one way and if it is in a sub section it would look another - essentially so each section could have a 'landing page' which looks like a home page?

Thanks

[malbro]

HI,

yes our site is super customised so I do understand block ifs and custom variables to a certain extent.

I'm probably going to sound really thick now - but when you say 'navigation lists' are you referring to the standard structure of the site within sellerdeck i.e. the content tree and design tree?

If you are referring to the navigation on the site - as in the side menus/top menus - we have custom hard coded menus, rather than automatically populated menus anyway so im not sure that would be an issue...


Our site currently has a main layout with block if's to tell it whether it is the home page - would it be possible to translate this to a new section layout so if it is the section 'home page' or landing page it will look one way and if it is in a sub section it would look another - essentially so each section could have a 'landing page' which looks like a home page?

Thanks

Yes I was referring to the automatic generation of the navigation by Sellereck.

The easiest way is to setup a new top section for the new web site using a new overall layout, the url of this page is your landing page for the new site, which will be in the usual format of domain-name/acatalog/new-page.html where the domain name is the domain name of the main site.

[NormanRouxel]

It is possible to merge a sites Sections and Products into an existing site, putting all the new stuff into a single sub-section via an Hierarchical Export (File / Export). This creates a text file which needs a little editing.

First remove all lines (they'll be near the beginning) starting with Brochure. Now you only have Section and Product data.

To re-import this into a single Section, look for the first line starting with Section and copy it so there are two copies, one above the other. Edit the first of these lines and change the name (e.g. NEWSTUFF) and page name (will end in .html - e.g. newstuff.html).

Then look for the very last line starting with End Section and make another End Section line below it. We've now wrapped the entire catalog inside a single Section calld NEWSTUFF (you can rename this later).

Now assuming you've copied all images from the source site into the same relative locations in the destination site and your page names and product references are unique between the sites you should be able to import this via File / Import / Hierarchical / Update.

If you have duplicated page names or product ID's they will show up in the error log. You can fix this by opening the import file in Excel and tweaking the appropriate data.

N.B. Try this on a copy of your site on a spare machine. And back-up the entire site folder before so you can repair things if disaster strikes.

Worked fine when I tried it here.

[abbi_newbie]

Thank you all for your detailed replies!!

Much appreciated - I am going to make a detailed action plan then hopefully start this very soon!

Thanks again - very helpful!

[saucysal]

A very different approach

I am not sure whether this will be at all helpful; we have quite a different approach to a similar issue. We have a website which is the main one, and we have another website that is more specialised. They are two different websites with two different domain names and different colour schemes, but are both in Sellerdeck (multi-site). We update our stock quantities from Sage to Sellerdeck for both sites, and download our orders from both sites and export from Sellerdeck to Sage.

Sarah

[abbi_newbie]

Quick Question

Hi Norman - I know it was some time you posted this but I have a question about the export.

You said to remove the lines with Brochure in them...there are some lines at the top that say 'Header' and 'ContentCategories' before you get to the Section lines.

Are these to be removed as well?

Thanks

Abbi

[Duncan Rounding]

You should be able to leave the header lines at the top as they are they are used to define the columns for each row that is preceded by the header type.They don't contain specific site data.

[abbi_newbie]

Thank you for your reply.

Unfortunately, now I have tried the import it has only imported one product - the error file has many lines saying:
"Line 746: An invalid Product could not be imported.

Line 746: The selected image file \\BMCDONALD-PC\SellerDeck 2013\Sites\Test upload\images\new design\dollshouses\Toy Motors and Garages\letoyvan\legrandgarage1.jpg does not exist."

However, when I go through the folders I have placed the images in there - any ideas?

Thanks

[Duncan Rounding]

Presumably the images are on the same computer. In which case you don't need the full path to the image file - just the path from within your site's folder. Try changing the path and see if it helps.