Actinic Templates

[Thruss23]

My site was developed for me a couple of years ago using Dreamweaver and actinic. I have always experienced problems with SE ranking and various other things such as getting my search function working within my site.

I am going to be re-developing my site myself and have been looking at the knowledge base to do a little research before I start, and lots of people have raised questions about using Dreamweaver with Actinic.

I want to use Actinic standard templates because of my technical expertise however I would like to develop my home page in Dreamweaver as it gives me more control over the layout and design.

Is there any reason I should not be doing this and will this potentially affect search engine ranking or cause any conflicts?

If you wish to look at my site, it is www.fullofitawards.co.uk.

[jont]

Welcome to the forum,

there is no problem using DW to create the homepage for you - just remember to disable the Actinic homepage inside Actinic or it will upload and over-write each time you refresh the web site.

There are many arguements about the pro's and con's of using a DW or Actinic homepage. DW allows the greater flexability in design terms but Actinic allows everything to be handled in the one program. If done correctly the Actinic page will receive equal ranking as the DW page - but this does require some expert tweaking and is more tricky to get the layout right in Actinic than DW.

I tend to do a mix of both - the last site was handled by Actinic but I spent way too long converting to a full CSS designed theme than I should have. But everything is now handled by Actinic so no need to launch DW to tweak a sentence or add a new product etc.

Try and keep the homepage the same overall design as per the Actinic pages though - now't worse than having a completely different homepage design to the rest of the site. Site navigation is possibly the only contention in keeping the DW page the same as Actinic and remembering to add any new products and sections in there.

HTH

[RuralWeb]

I go for the full Actinic site rather than a site split with DW. I did build sites with a DW front end but saw no significant advantage as far as SEs go so I converted them all to full Actinic. The last one being my own website which is actually doing better in the SEs than my old DW one.

[Thruss23]

Thank you for your responses. I think I will stick with Dreamweaver as my homepage as I don't think I am cleaver enough to change the actinic templates.

Can you give me the steps to follow to turn off the Actinic home page so that my Dreamweaver page will always load.

Dee

[dscontroller]

Dee,

Click on the house in the content tree of Actinic and you should then see in the Page Details panel the tick box to use as home page or not.

David

[Bruce]

You will also need to go into Design | Options | Miscellaneous and 'Home Page Link', select the appropriate one for you.

Kind regards,