Existing Dreamweaver designed sites

[DigitalJohnBoy]

Hi

Apologies if this has been covered - I couldn't find an exact post on it.

If there is an existing working site designed in Dreamweaver 8, how easy is it to 'Actinic' it.

That is, if the Dreamweaver site has all the 'usual suspects' pages of About Us, Links, etc and I want to put an 'online shop' link on the home page, is this really practical?

I know of the Actinic Dreamweaver extension but my first attempts have been problematic - is there any documented detailed info on this subject?

Would I have to recreate all the pages of the site as fragment pages in Actinic?

I really want to work with the power of Dreamweaver design and the professional Actinic E-Commerce facility.

[JulesRS]

Hi John,

This is exactly what I have been working on and hope to have live soon. My main site was created in Dreamweaver and as you say all of the usual links, e.g. 'About Us' etc. are all included on the main site. I have a link which will go directly to my Actinic shop once I have the shop live. I believe this is perfectly practical as long as there is consistency between the original Dreamweaver site and the Actinic shop. By this I mean that the design of the shop should be in keeping with the main DW created site otherwise it looks messy.

I used the help guide to register my design template (outer layout) within Actinic. I am not an expert but I somehow managed to set it up after a bit of tweaking.

Now, all of my Actinic pages have the outer layout which effectively consists of my logo and main menu at the top of the page and a sub-menu at the bottom of every Actinic Shop page. Effectively, once you have registered your DW design with Actinic, wherever you place the 'INNERLAYOUT' layout in DW will be where your Actinic content appears on the page.

Would I have to recreate all the pages of the site as fragment pages in Actinic?

If you already have 'About Us' and 'Links' pages on your main site and you are happy to leave them there, then you don't have to recreate these within your Actinic shop too. However, if you want to delete these from your main site and have them in Actinic you would have to create new pages.

I hope that helps.

[DigitalJohnBoy]

Hi Julie

Many thanks for your prompt and very helpful reply.

I guess the only thing I can't get my head around (and it's probably me being a numpty until the penny drops) is that say you have designed a site in Dreamweaver and you have all the standard pages in a folder on your hard drive - i.e. index.html, links.html, about.html, etc and these would be uploaded to your host account.

Now when you bring Actinic into the equation, I guess you take your basic layout, register it with Actinic and then insert your main Actinic Content, namely INNERLAYOUT.

So now you have the design in Actinic with all the necessary code entered in the INNERLAYOUT area.

This is where I get a little confused - there are new files in the SITE folder of Actinic i.e. the shop, but the other site pages reside in the original Dreamweaver folder, namely links.html, news.html, etc.

I suppose I am a little confused about the logistics of uploading all these files and folders - what gets uploaded from Actinic and what gets uploaded from Dreamweaver?

Hope this makes sense! Just need to get my head around the whole file structure thing.

[Duncan Rounding]

Create your design in DW and in DW set up the DW site file location to be the same folder as Actinic (Site1). Then register the design in Actinic and add the Actinic components you want in your design. Actinic will then upload all the files required. If you find that some files etc are not uploaded they can be added to the Additional Files List in Actinic.

You should not need to upload with DW unless you have pages that are not part of the DW/Actinic design.

[DigitalJohnBoy]

Many thanks Duncan.

[JulesRS]

Hi John,

This is where I get a little confused - there are new files in the SITE folder of Actinic i.e. the shop, but the other site pages reside in the original Dreamweaver folder, namely links.html, news.html, etc.

I suppose I am a little confused about the logistics of uploading all these files and folders - what gets uploaded from Actinic and what gets uploaded from Dreamweaver?

Yes, it is a bit confusing!

This is how I understand it...

You will already have a folder residing on your hard drive (outside of the Actinic Site 1 folder as it's totally separate from Actinic) containing all your main website files. You will then have connected to your remote host from within Dreamweaver and automatically transferred these files to your server to public_html.

Effectively, when you look at your site in Actinic, what you are viewing is the template (outer layout) you created within DW plus the Actinic content. Therefore, when you have created your site within Actinic, the site will upload to the 'acatalog' folder including all the outer layout from DW.

I am currently testing my site. To be honest, I am not too well up on exactly how this works. However, I have an idea this is what happens....but may well be corrected by someone who knows more about this sort of thing.

Each of the navigation links within the DW Actinic template, links to my main site. (e.g. 'About Us' etc.) Therefore, when Actinic uploads it looks for these files outside of the acatalog folder and finds them within the public_html folder where the main site files sit. So, there shouldn't be any other action required as the files seem to be found by Actinic.

When you upload your Actinic site you need to finally make sure that you add your shop.html link (or whatever name you have given your shop) to the 'Shop' navigation button on your main site to allow customers access to your shop.

I hope that makes sense.

[RuralWeb]

Your making the whole process very complicated - just build your whole site in Actinic. There is no real advantage in having external pages controlled by DW.

[JulesRS]

This is true if you are building your site from scratch. However, if you already have a site which works and you have spent time building, the last thing you want to do is start again and replicate work you have already done.

By the sound of it, John already has a site and simply wishes to integrate this with Actinic.

[leehack]

I had a very similar situation today whereby client had 14 externally designed pages, plus a different shopping cart to actinic. He wanted the shopping cart replaced to actinic and was going to keep his external pages, i said we should put them all within the one package so he has a single place to do anything on his website - this is the best approach by far.

It took me an hour to replicate the code from the 14 pages into actinic. Just make sure the page title, page name and meta info is the same and you then have the same page and the same rankings, but the big advantage of a central place for management.

As for links on your DW template, if you do keep the external pages, external, and not within actinic, make sure that you use full urls to them and not relative ones. Once you are in the actinic shop, a relative url to your external about us page will not work at all.

Simple rule:

If external, then full url.
If internal, relative is fine.

[RuralWeb]

This is true if you are building your site from scratch. However, if you already have a site which works and you have spent time building, the last thing you want to do is start again and replicate work you have already done

IMO you are creating more work by keeping the pages external to Actinic but hell what do I know

[jont]

IMO you are creating more work by keeping the pages external to Actinic but hell what do I know

Yep. In the short term it is quicker and simpler to keep external... but long run it is worth the time and effort to integrate as future changes to the layout are all handled in one place... it will save you time and effort by integrating.

[RuralWeb]

it will save you time and effort by integrating.

jont you obviously dont know what you are talking about so pack it all in now and take up knitting like me

[jont]

Just finished a rather fetching cardigan ... the pattern is on email to you now Mal.

[leehack]

Me next please Jonty, my nipper's gonna need some booties.

[los_design]

Create your design in DW and in DW set up the DW site file location to be the same folder as Actinic (Site1). Then register the design in Actinic and add the Actinic components you want in your design. Actinic will then upload all the files required. If you find that some files etc are not uploaded they can be added to the Additional Files List in Actinic.

You should not need to upload with DW unless you have pages that are not part of the DW/Actinic design.

As Duncan points out....there is nothing complicated, design in DW, register with Actinic end of.

Ensure you edit your site as Dunc states above and fiddly dee, all changes etc are simply updated into your chosen layout.

O/T Jonty, any chance of a tea caddy in navy blue and white?