Brochure Page or Hand coded page?

[zee_b]

Hi everyone, happy new year.

For many years ive been using Actinic, however only now am i trying to use it more efficiently.

At present Actinic Catalog builds my online shop, and i link to this through a seperate index page created in dreamweaver. Doing so i am able to able to optimize my site and obtain PR4 (i know thats not great). When i do spend lots of time optimizing the site, i do often get top 5 ranking on google. However this comes at the expense of the look and feel of the site, as the index shows one thing and the rest of the site looks rather different.

Also using the online validator, my index page created in dreamweaver is often W3C compliant, however pages created in Actinic are not.

So my query is, which is better to use:
A dreamweaver built index/home page or one using Actinic. Or the brochure pages of Actinic and its Fragments?

Which would be better optimized, as in which will the search engines favour more?

Thanks in advance

Zee

[Bruce]

Can other users who have experience with SEO comment here please and put down your thoughts as to what you would suggest.

Kind regards,

[RuralWeb]

Hi I have been building sites for the last two years with both Actinic front ends and DW front ends and I can say that the results are very similar as far as SEO goes. You will find it very hard to get above WRC3 level A compliance if you use Actinic ( DW can give you W3C AAA ) but Actinic is far easier and quicker to use.

Certainly my clients who only use Actinic find it far easier than those who use Contribute 3 (Cut down DW content management software). You can still do the main SEO techniques using Actinic so there is very little disadvantage. I have now made the leap and decided to convert all the sites with DW front ends to fully Actinic and use DW only for modifying the Actinic templates.

SEO is a bit of a holly grail and a never ending task that is controlable to the finest detail with DW BUT I think the usability advantages of Actinic are more of an advantage to a small business who is trying to do lots of other things as well.

In short Actinic is best

PS: Unless they change to a dynamic database that creates pages on the fly, in which case forget it and use DW!

[jont]

I tend to go down the route of modifying a previewed Actinic page for the homepages to keep the style and usability but greater freedom in layout of certain aspects (this also removes the tell tale "made with Actinic software" that alot of sites can exhibit with certain themes)- but that is in conjunction with a handcoded navigation not through the cgi-bin which made a big difference.

I do have sites with an Actinic homepage and as Rural says there can be little difference if set up correctly to that of a DW page and you do get the all-in-one package just using Actinic