Product Layout - Best Practice

[Owen Drumm]

Perhaps someone could enlighten me about the best practice for the following.

I have a site at http://www.healthy2day.co.uk which required products displayed as they are at present with a name, reference, price and single add to cart button. On clicking the name the product description comes up with an option of adding to the cart which again is fine. This was achieved by putting the full description details in the extended information text and using an extended info page with an add to cart button.

The problem I am having with this is that the site now appears to be very large in size in version 8. I have designed a similar site for the same clients in version 7 selling much the same products and more in fact using the full description field instead of the extended info page as default at http://www.supplement-warehouse.co.uk and yet the site there is less that 30mb whilst the version 8 of healthy2day is 94mb which takes far too long to back up and also upload.

Is this a problem with the way I have gone about this or just with version 8?

[Nadeem]

Hi there

Most of the layouts are not held within the database rather than templates, so I am wondering if you database is quite large now. One thing to do, is to go to "Housekeeping | Compact Database..", make sure they both are ticked and check again. See if that made any different

Kind Regards

[Owen Drumm]

Compacted it and went from 127mb to 41mb. Why would the difference be so much?

[Nadeem]

Hi Owen

There are instances where if you remove a record from Access database, it does not free up the space (This is within Access not Actinic), so by compacting the database it will remove all the free space that is in the database. Therefore if you are adding alot of products, moving sections, adding design layout, which are all being modifed, deleted, created in Access, you may see the database being bloated after some time.

Kind Regards