How long to build an Actinic?

[bheroniphr]

Hi there,

I'm about to start building a brand new Actinic catalogue for our shop. I am highly experienced in all web languages namely HTML, ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, CSS and JavaScript. I have however, never even seen Actinic!

Our cart will need to conform to my new web design for which I have templates already constructed from when I built the main site. There are approximately 200 products in about 20-30 categories all of which will need individual pricing, images and descriptions.

Can any experienced (or ameteur) Actinic-er advise how long they could estimte this might take? Need to have up in a few weeks and want to know whether I should take time off or could do it over a few evenings...

Many thanks,

Benjamin

[jont]

Once you get your head around how Actinic works with the templates and you have you new templates for your design sorted then adding in 200 products should not be long - if you have the info in a spreadsheet etc then even better to just drag them in.

If you are conversant with HTML and burn the midnight oil 2 weeks should be feasible IMHO. As I say.. it is undrstanding how the templates work that will the slow part. Best to down load the Advanced User Guide and Design Guides from the main Actinic website ASAP and have a quick scan through before starting

[B_Online]

I had 200 products done under a fortnight, as mentioned it’s a slow start then once you realise you can copy and paste you will have it done in no time…depending on how much time your putting in a day, if your working on it, say a full working day, you could have it done in a week, also depending on your products and how many options associated with it, like many unique (which would be hard to copy and paste) attributes like colour or quantity etc, then dig in, you could be there a while.

[Olly]

I got used to the way actinic works relitavely quickly (about a week, maybe two) and thats with very, very limited HTML knowledge.
Download the free trial, you get complete access and gives you a chance to see what you think.

[jont]

Download the free trial, you get complete access and gives you a chance to see what you think.

...... and a running start to the site

[Max]

If I could suggest that you start to get your images sized for showing on the site, sort images in to folders by type

I have a habit of naming my pictures using the product code and name, also if I make thumbnails of the pictures.

For example a picture of a "T" shirt would be:

For the main picture it would be : tshirt_ex123_foto
For the thumbnail it would be : tshirt_ex123_thumb
and if you use a popup window : tshirt_ex123_pop

They then would be stored in a folder called t_shirts

Makes life so much quicker, this will save a lot of hassle when you are preparing the site.

Max

[RuralWeb]

Top Tip - When saving images call them by thier name, Google looks at image names when ranking a site and images with correct names ie key words helps lots.

[leehack]

Im on my 2432nd product as we speak. Fist ever website built, first ever Actinic catalogue. Time so far, 3 months, of which reading was a month!!

[pinbrook]

or call your images by the product ref as this saves time with spreadsheet imports

[jont]

or call your images by the product ref as this saves time with spreadsheet imports

Thats how I do it also....may lose an n'th of a mark with Google but it makes life easier maintaining the site and makes life much harder for people wanting to steal and hot link images via a Google search (my only hotlinked images were those named after the item not by product number)

[gary in jersey]

hi jont

im interested to know what a hot linked image is, and why someone would do this...

[completerookie]

If people sell the same product as you, then it would be quite easy in their HTML to link all pictures to your web site, this would immediatley save them the hassle of creating all those pics, uploading them etc

if you use the product-code eg AB1234.gif then the lazy competitor has to go to the hassle of working out whta pictures mean what.

kev

[jont]

The main issue with hotlinking is that as the image remains on your server you are paying the bandwidth for the other sites linking through to the image... if it is a large image and the referring site has lots of hits this can rack up quite quickly.