Brochure as home page

[JimboS]

I know it is there somehwere, but where do i specify that I want the brochure to be my index page?

[gabrielcrowe]

find the index brochure, usually the top one in the list with a little house on it

its properties panel has 'use as website homepage' on it.

bear in mind that when someone visits your server, the server gives them one of several pages, in order of preference.

on our server:

index.html
index.htm
index.php

make sure there are no conflicts, between your ending file extensions too, since this may cause other pages to come up instead of your brochure first page

[little gift box]

Hi I am new to the forum and am using actinic 7, I too want to use my brochure as my home page, have you managed this yet? If so I would really appreciate it if you could share your findings with me. thanks Clare

[leehack]

Clare when you first load up actinic, it puts a dummy store in for you, with a picture of a house at the very top, this is your home page.

[little gift box]

thanks for the prompt reply Lee. Is this the only page you can use for your home page,I want my brochure page, where I have all my product sections with pictures, to be the firstpage the public see, is this possible?

[leehack]

The house picture is the home page which would be the page accessed if you went to web address - http://www.mysite.co.uk/. The shop top page (icon looks like a wad of dollars to me), would be located at http://www.mysite.co.uk/acatalog/. These are 2 different places, one is the root of your domain and one is then the root of your online shop.

If you want people to always hit the http://www.mysite.co.uk/acatalog/ part of your site when they visit, you have to setup what is called a 301 redirect to that address with your webhost. This is because when you type in the main web address it will always look for a file at the very top level, if you do not want that to be that page, then you need to tell your hosts where you want it to be.

I would type in http://www.mysite.co.uk/ and the 301 redirect would automatically take me to:

http://www.mysite.co.uk/actalog/index.html (or whatever the page is called, possibly 'shop.html')

[little gift box]

Thanks again Lee. Do you know if the 301 redirect costs money? Also, I have been on your website and looked at Birmingham Model Centre. I hope you don't mnd me asking but is their first page their brochure page and if so do they use 301 redirect?
Thanks, Clare

[leehack]

Thanks again Lee. Do you know if the 301 redirect costs money?

It shouldn't do, i know of at least one host that does not offer the ability to do this, however it is pretty standard nowadays and should be free. The file that does this for you, needs uploading to your server, following the instructions specified in previous posts. Once done it should just start working.

Also, I have been on your website and looked at Birmingham Model Centre. I hope you don't mnd me asking but is their first page their brochure page and if so do they use 301 redirect?
Thanks, Clare

The home page of the model shop is outside of Actinic, i created it using the normal software we use for web design. I have then linked the various sections through to the actinic shop. There is no 301 redirect in place, there is the home page controlled by me and then the shop top page controlled by actinic.

In other words there is no 'house' icon in actinic for that site, just the 'wad of dollars' icon, as all brochure pages have been deleted from actinic, leaving just the shop and it's sections.

[acompton]

Clare,

If you're looking for an example, my shop has the main brochure page as the home page. One tiny drawback with this is that Actinic only allows about 20 letters for the page title, so you can't use it with a long shop name; nor can you include a tagline in the title which most shops do.

Alan Compton
www.greenknightgames.co.uk
Great board games and cards games you won't find in the High Street

[leehack]

I'd not spotted that before Alan, probably because i've never done that. Have you had a look at the field in the database to see if it can be extended? That's very limiting for you otherwise and a right pain in the backside.