Actinic V9

[zenicman9]

Hi All,

I need some advice I am going to look into becoming well trained within Actinic I trained on there course back in 2009 and now I want to become well trained in it.

Does anyone have any advice or can anyone offer training? The main reason I want to learn actinic is becuase I have 2 websites which I own and I need to get the shops live.

The main worry is that designers charge £2000 per site so £4000 which is alot of cash.

[leehack]

Time is the factor Kevin, as an absolute bare minimum working as a designer you'd need to devote 18 months of your life full time to it. That'd make you good, but not great. £4000 is a steal, £6000 would be also. Sites turning over 100's of thousands, some even in the millions don't see those figures as high at all.

If you were going to go to those lengths, you'd be better to start a new career as a designer, cos it would be so so much wasted time otherwise. Did you join the gas safe register so you can fit your own gas pipes? Did you go to college so you can fit your own carpet or plaster your own walls? It's the same principle.

A good professional designer will simply pay for himself ten times over, before you have even got one site live, i think you're looking at it wrongly. It's not just about their design skills, it's about all the hidden gems and extra bits of advice that come with your designer.

I'm biased of course, but also in the great position to have seen what makes a site work and what does not, simply by evaluating sites i've worked on. A homemade sites stands out almost every single time against a professional one **, remember what goes on behind a site (the hidden stuff) is just as important nowadays, particularly with Google's focus.

£6000 over 3 years for 2 sites = £19.23 per site per week - that's simply one of the best bargains you could ever ask to meet.

** of late (past 2 years probably) the golf tee site would be the only one that strikes me as not looking homemade, but even he mentioned the time taken to do it was ridiculous and he'd have been wiser paying a professional, getting it live about 11 months earlier and using that time on what he does need to be great at - his products.

PS - if the second site used the same framework, i'd not imagine any designer charging you full price for a second use, nowhere near in fact.

[Duncan Rounding]

Hi All,

I need some advice I am going to look into becoming well trained within Actinic I trained on there course back in 2009 and now I want to become well trained in it.

Does anyone have any advice or can anyone offer training? The main reason I want to learn actinic is becuase I have 2 websites which I own and I need to get the shops live.

The main worry is that designers charge £2000 per site so £4000 which is alot of cash.

You first need to be well versed with standard html before getting into the depths of an Actinic design. If time and money are of the essence then I'd recommend you stick with the standard themes supplied with Actinic for the time being.

[zenicman9]

Thanks for the help Guys,

I already have a good amount of knowledge of SEO and I did quite alot of work on actinic V7 I just cant seem to get to grips with v9,

I need to find some good ways to either make 2/3 sites and how much someone would charge and the time frame.

[pinbrook]

I did quite alot of work on actinic V7 I just cant seem to get to grips with v9,

the best thing to do is set yourself targets, take a site you like and try to recreate it in actinic. Then scrap it and start another.

Read all the documents you can find, actinic help files, actinic knowledge base, tips and tricks in this forum, Lee's tutorials etc etcetc.

Learn by doing - but dont learn on a live site.

[zenicman9]

Hi,

Are there any good guides or books to learn actinic?

[Duncan Rounding]

No book as such but there are these:

The Actinic program help
The beginners guide - Actinic website
The advanced user guide - Actinic website
The knowledgebase - Actinic website

You will also find some tutorials around on various designer's websites

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

the golf tee site would be the only one that strikes me as not looking homemade, but even he mentioned the time taken to do it was ridiculous and he'd have been wiser paying a professional, getting it live about 11 months earlier and using that time on what he does need to be great at - his products.

That would be me then, thanks Lee.

Kevin, if you don't already have a decent knowledge of html and in particular CSS the time spent trying to achieve a decent looking site will be long. I only had a basic html knowledge and no experience of css when I started my own V9 redesign and took around 12 months (or more I can't remember exactly) as I could only work on the design 3-10 hours a week. I do now have more html and css knowledge although far less than the likes of Lee.
I finally managed to get a reasonable looking site although a designer would have used more efficient code than I have and produced it far quicker meaning the redesign would have gone live sooner and been bringing in extra revenue.

The reason I choose to DIY the site design was that I am a stingy stubborn git who hates paying for somebody else to do something I could do myself even if it is not cost effective to do so and isn't logocal to do so.


Summary:

If you can afford to pay out for a designer do so because the extra sales you will get will soon cover the initial outlay.
If you can't or won't pay for a designer by all means have a go yourself but be prepared to either accept an amateurish website or be prepared to put in a lot of your time and accept that a go live date may be far in the distant unless you already are experienced in html and css, although you would still have to master V9.

I am glad a did it myself but would not actually recommend it to others.

[zenicman9]

Hi Darren

Could you drop me an email with how you started etc?

hello@kevinwiles.co.uk

Thanks

[toolman.co.uk]

Lee,

I would pay you £23.19 a week to tweek mine, when you talk £100s K and £1m's, thats a no brainer!

[leehack]

It was £19.23 Daniel, you're overquoting me lol.

Seriously though if a site costs £3k even and you keep it for 3 years, that's less than £20 per week. If a new design can't recoup that many times over, then the site never needed the redesign in the first place or it was done badly of course.

It's a pity that people's business details and more to the point that costs vs reward chats can't really be entered into on the forum, but there really are some fabulous genuine stories, with multi million pound actinic sites still managing to double their turnover over the space of a year or so after a redesign.

The right site in the right market with the right design, really is a monster, where the actual success possible has surprised me on occasions when you either see it yourself or read about it.

[Jan]

There are hundreds of people running DIY sites out there, so don't be put off trying to learn if that is what you want to do. You have had some good advice already in this thread on how to start out with that.

I think that you should turn around the way you are thinking. You need to get your two sites live so that they can start to earn money for you so make a list of what is stopping that happening and look at the ways of finding out how to do that. It may be that the most cost effective way to do that is to hire someone to get that done quickly. Don't forget to build in the cost of not having the sites live when you work out the costings.

What I did with my sites is to have them professionally designed with a view to maintaining them myself - however I'm busy (and maybe lazy) and my designer is brilliant so I don't, they don't actually need much doing though to be honest now that they are complete, also if you have two sites, you could potentially have one template to use for both which would reduce the cost.

Regards,

[leehack]

You could also have a chat with this guy - http://www.kevinwiles.co.uk/website-design/ - he has the same name as you which could be cool if not a little spooky and he says he's a fully trained website designer, knowing design is at least half the battle.

[Mike Hughes]

Interesting that this guys website also links to same one as in the OPs signature with a 'happy customer' quote:

Kevin was very professional and acted fast to help me promote my website after I was made redundant

Glen Jones
Designer Clothing London

Read more

OK. We're having a bit of fun here, but if you're a fully qualified web designer then what's this thread all about?

Mike

[chris ashdown]

I just ran for a couple of years with basic actinic sites from the box, they worked and made us good money

After a couple of years we then had a idea of what we wanted and talked to a designer (Jonty) who designed our sites for us combining his and our suggestions of what we wanted

I would second the motion to just get the sites up and running with a nice looking standard design and start earning money and rateings on google, then when you really know what you want to achieve get adjusting them slowely or pay a designer to do it for you

All the best