Adding additional pages to Actinic

[June]

Hi,

I have an Actinic site which incorporates a front end with information pages (Using NetObjects Fusion 8) and this links with Actinic

I think it may look better and be more search-engine friendly (please do correct me here if I'm wrong!) if I used Actinic for the whole lot

Trouble is, we supply both services & goods, so I am trying to combine both functions into one.

I find for some reason the Search Engine Spider Simulator spiders another (Actinic site) without a problem, but with Netobjects, gets as far as the meta tags & description & is unable to spider any further

Dreamweaver I find to be a complicated package to learn if this is the only other way to integrate

Does anyone have ideas which could help me to come to some conclusion on this?

Many thanks for any help you can offer

June

[retekdirect]

I'd recommend persevering and learning Dreamweaver. It's just a fancy text editor really - as long as you're happy with HTML code, the rest is just bells and whistles. Many people like Dreamweaver with Actinic for the visual half of it - you can see what is generated in real-time.

Also, Actinic's Extention (plug-in) for Dreamweaver makes reading and editing the Actinic templates much, much easier. I can't rate this highly enough - a huge headache-saver.

Can't really comment about the SEO (search engine optimisation) stuff. I do know that, depending on the way you have your site and catalogue set up, it may help the overall look and feel of the whole thing if it's Actinic-controlled.


Hope some of that helps,

Ryan

[June]

Thanks for that, Ryan - I think you may be right about Dreamweaver, though.

If I did decide to use only Actinic, do you know if there is any way of building a number of additional information pages into Actinic, but not as brochure pages?

[retekdirect]

Not exactly sure, I'm not using brochure pages just now. I'd assume that the only way to add additional pages using Actinic would be through brochure pages. I may be wrong though!


Ryan

[garyhay]

June

We usually build other info pages inside Actinic using fragments.

It then becomes easier to maintain as you dont have double work to do updating the external pages as well.

You can create a section at the stores bottom level called "Other Stuff" and put all your brouchure pages in there. Maybe use a slightly different template in this part of the site.

You can then place hard coded links in navigation etc to these pages.

[June]

Thanks Gary, certainly something to consider