Can I buy a £50 template?

[polybeads]

#15,

That looks quite good except when I started scrolling down and saw what was below the bottom orange bar, there is a complete mess of text and logos all over the place.

[RuralWeb]

complete mess of text and logos all over the place

There are reasons for this, but if you were paying for the £500 package i am sure Jo would put whatever you wanted on the page - after all that is what you would be paying for.

[polybeads]

Rural, what would be the reason to have things sprawled al over the place rather than organised neatly? (please bear in mind I m new to this and Im am mainly looking at things in a customer persective) I understand you need the links there to increase your rankings on search engine but I have never seen a proffesionally designed site look like that?

Like I said I have no problem paying for something but only if it looks really good, most of the sites I have seen look like they are a home based business with hashed together templates with colours that dont look good together.

Im not sure about the example sites but the actual http://buythisdesign.com/ site looks good and impressive and looks like a real company when you open the web page.

[Duncan Rounding]

If you are looking at the possibility of changing your current competitive solution to an Actinic one but want to use different prebuilt templates than those currently available then buythisdesign may suit you. If you want to develope your own design then you could start with a clean template design and develope whatever you wish.
And I agree, they do look good.

[janep]

Version 8 - is it due soon???

Sure Solutions offers themes prebuilt in Actinic. ..............

There will be five new designs for version eight available when Actinic moves the version 8 software to production. We will also be releasing a few new add on tools for Actinic................

Does anyone know when version 8 is due
I know that 7.0.6 is in beta now

Thanks
Jane

[pinbrook]

There are reasons for this, but if you were paying for the £500 package i am sure Jo would put whatever you wanted on the page - after all that is what you would be paying for.

I'm not sure whatRural Web is promising on my behalf, but my gut reaction is no, I won't put whatever you wanted on a page. That is custom design.

I am proposing to supply preformatted themes as an extra to the actinic themes, which as we all know can be lacking.

there will be 2 prices, one for a theme be sold only to one person. It will not include customisation. The other is for a theme to be sold to as many people as want it.
Prices are not even confirmed yet, nor will any themes be available until a few months after V8 has been released.

[polybeads]

Pinbrook (or anyone else) for a £500 template how many working hours do you think that would take to create?

[I-CC]

It is not as simple to say it takes X amount of hours to develop a custom unique theme, as every one of them will have different needs, but a starting point for a theme would be a minimum 50 hours for anything other than the most basic theme build, and then some hrs on top dependant on the complexity of the design.

Examples of custom themes as opposed to default themes with some minor alterations being:
http://www.theflyingpiguk.com/
http://www.babychannelshop.com/
http://www.auto-connect.co.uk/
http://www.sky-craft.co.uk/
http://www.absintheonline.com/
http://www.warwickgifts.co.uk/

[RuralWeb]

I'm not sure whatRural Web is promising on my behalf

Sorry Jo - I understand what you are offering now.

[polybeads]

looks like I may be going off Actinic quickly :-o

I have set up several differnt cubecart stores before and they normally look pretty good with only a couple of hours work.

I think this one is done by cubecart http://www.safetyprovider.co.uk and looks pretty good to me and better than a lot of the ones I have seen so far in actinic. I really like all the features and settings of actinic but it seems like the design part really lets it down. 50 to 100 hours to get a very basic looking site sounds a lot!

Something like http://www.landofleather.co.uk/ looks good (to me) its clear and easy to navigate and is the sort of site I would want to emulate. Also caraudiodirect.co.uk (dont know what it runs on) looks clear and professional.

[BPJSURF]

Totally bogus IMHO

I would like to see some sites that you have built using cube cart that took a couple hours to deply and look pretty good? ( is that looks or functions pretty good?)

The site you show in your posting is custom developed. We have converted a few cude cart users to Actinic over the past few years. Most convert becuse it takes forever to put products in the web site and there is no capabilities for the merchant to control the site like in Actinic.

Your comparision is apples to oranges. Actinic's software allows a developer to build a custom built site with many feature unavailable with competing carts. The software allows a great deal of functionality to be very easily maintained by a merchant after the coding is complete. This model gives the merchant contol and leaves teh developer to build new cleint sites rather then perform maintenace. You put in a bulk of hours to deploy the site (50 to a hundered for a custom site is resonable) and then leave the merchant too it.

Cube cart on the other hand does not offer the extended functionality of Actinic and the user innerface is well less then to be desired, leaving the developer laboring over product maintenance and the site is essentially in a state of never ending development.

Two products with two differnt business models. IF your looking to offer cheep low functioning ecommerce thats not easy to use and has no real sustainable business model you should try , at least its free.

Just a side note about cubecart and Xcart. We have worked with both carts and their databases are not completely stable. We had major problems where the mysql database would complelty kill the server. Turns out the code quality was an issue for both in older versions. Its great to have access to the code and database using PHP and mysql. But if you run into trouble with user sessions on the server and your database gets currupt everyday the maintenance to the database becomes painful. You get what you pay for with software.

Brian Johnson

[Ho Ho Bird]

What have I started?

Wow - this is an active community (a good sign!). Am I safe to assume there is a market for something in the 'middle' (between Actinic's current offer and the beautiful custom made sites many of you offer)?

This must be a massive market. I guess many Actinic users are small (1 or 2 people) businesses with turnovers of less than £100K and profits of less than £0K! We can buy a super solid platform, and get it running ourselves for £300+vat (discounted) but stare at quotes of £3000+ to make it 'sexy' looking.

The coffee site mentioned, and my own example of gardengadets.co.uk show what can be done with just a few blocks of colour and a few photos. If someone can show us (sell us) a way we can build one of these for under a £1000 they will be busy people. When we have online profits we can then invest in something sexier and custom built.

Any offers?

[polybeads]

Maybe i mis wrote my post, what I am trying to say is that Cubecart looks good straight out of the box (so to speak) its reasonably easy to get up and running and its quite easy to customise the colours and add graphics and logos. It looks professional almost straight away but i cant really see a real future with cubecart as its not a real product its ok for a few orders per day and only a limited amount of products but it soon seems to feel like its going to fall down at some point.

Thats why i was interested in actinic but I wanted to see some examples of some good looking sites.

I am sure I am not alone in thinking that if a site looks like its been made at home by an amateur than its customer service and business could also be similar? I know its not necessarily true but its just how people seem to think.This would obviously affect sales, a poor looking website will probably lose you more money from "lost sales" by people who have simply clicked back to google after seeing your first page (than the money you would of spent on having the site designed properly in the first place),

#26
Do you have a couple of actinic sites that you can post the addresses of that you have created and are very happy with the design and colours etc?

or can anyone post some sites?

[pinbrook]

at a guess caraudiodirect is os commerce another PHP opensource cart, that has its following.

You certainly need more skills than actinic requires to customise one of these sites. But you don't have an initial purchase price.

I don't think any actinic developer is going to enter price discussion for custom work. Indeed this forum expressly forbids us too.

[pinbrook]

if you do a google search for "acatalog" you will unearth a load of sites, good and bad.

or go to actinic's site and take a look at their case studies