Site Structure - Best Practices

[Owen Drumm]

I am about to start a new site with approximately 100 products in it and am wondering what people think is the best practice for the site structure.

The products will be listed on Googlebase and I know they have been having issues with lots of products in one section. For this reason and also for SEO I am thinking of having every product in its own sub-section.

Any offers of advice will be appreciated.

[los_design]

Hi Owen

Good luck with the design and new project.

IMHO with this number of products I would defo opt for a 1 product per page scenario. Making sure that your end product is not too deep. I (and many others) are big fans of the 4 click (MAX ) principle...

HOME | CAT | PRODUCT | BUY

Great for SEO if done correctly.

Regards
Daren

[danlou84]

The one thing I HATE about actinic. and there is only one thing!

Is the filing structure. I hate it.. I am a designer and since I started years ago with sky tv I was always taught to structure your work. html - images - flash etc etc in different folders I hate that everything is in one place. It is messy from a developers point of view.

Also directly affects my work flow. They should look at introducing a feature where you can tell it types of files are kept in the parent folder. E.g select the folder your images are held within the site folder. and the same for html fla etc etc...

just my 2p..

[Duncan Rounding]

You can have sub-folders under your Site1 folder locally but they will all get bundled under acatalog on the server.

[los_design]

The one thing I HATE about actinic. and there is only one thing!

Is the filing structure. I hate it.. I am a designer and since I started years ago with sky tv I was always taught to structure your work. html - images - flash etc etc in different folders I hate that everything is in one place. It is messy from a developers point of view.

Also directly affects my work flow. They should look at introducing a feature where you can tell it types of files are kept in the parent folder. E.g select the folder your images are held within the site folder. and the same for html fla etc etc...

just my 2p..

You can keep it all organised locally as Duncan points out so your workflow should not be disturbed...LOCALLY

Just close your eyes when you look into you docs folder online

Regards
Daren

[kevster]

i would definitely go with the page per product approach, the more content/pages created per site the bigger your web 'footprint'...

[RuralWeb]

For this reason and also for SEO I am thinking of having every product in its own sub-section.

Im sure you have searched the forum as this area has been widely discussed ever since V8 was released and found the various methods of doing it.

[Owen Drumm]

I have decided to go with one product to a section with the section list in effect becoming a product list. I have each section page named after the product therein.

I am thinking about utilising the best sellers list on the front page as a way of providing content relevent to the site.

I am also putting a sitemap at the root outside the catalog to use in the Google Webmaster Tools area.

Any further thoughts would be useful to chew over.

[pinbrook]

Yes you are doing well... defo on the right lines

also think about http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?p=176809 post 37 this will add prices to your section level - which is useful