Actinic site on a CD for distribution??

[Mark H]

I would really like to put one of our Actinic sites on a CD (minus the ability to purchase of course....) for customers so that they can browse off-line, on a laptop for instance. Any ideas?

[wjcampbe]

Use my Act2pdf utility to provide your customers with a downloadable pdf catalogue, which they can then browse at liesure.

[Mark H]

Thanks Bill - we're certainly looking at PDF as well, but would also really like to be able to put a website on CD - having paddled around the Internet for a while on the issue it seems very complex (and/or expensive! - some companies do offer the service), but I thought there might be an elegant solution out there.......

[completerookie]

I may be able to answer this one. Actinic produces physical pages so its relatively easy to "download your web site onto your had disk"

go to HtTrack and download their free utility.

then go to you own web site and download "your own web site" on to the hard disk. The nice thing is that they see EXACTLY what you see on the web site.

Once you have it on the hard disk, play around and you can burn a CD as you want.

you would need to put a simple page on the front saying "You cannot order from this cd - please go to my real web site" and you could also edit the actual pages to change the default action "buy now buttons" to pop up the same message

I can tell you now that the utility will need "playing with" to get the best results as it initially emulates the spiders/robots that trawl the web but it CAN be made to work.

Once you've downloaded it once, then you can "refresh" the download at any time.

One question I have, why would you want to produce a CD version of your web site which, by definition, is out of date almost immediatly the CD is created

kev

[Mark H]

Thanks Kev - I'll certainly have a look at that - at the moment we are thinking along the lines of providing "functionality" on a CD - we now have a PDF copy of one product range brochure and are doing more, but we would like people to be able to search and move around etc with a menu system, and the obvious answer from this point of view seemed to be to be to put the website on a CD. There are other ways of providing functionality on a CD, but we have already done the work on the website........

Part of the answer to your question is that we want this to appeal to people when they are not connected - commuting, lying in bed, sitting on the........

Also, we are trying to avoid a printed catalogue which would suffer the same problem but be more expensive.

[los_design]

As mentioned above, HtTrack will let you download your complete site and browse offline with all the functions of your site (depending on the local machine set up re perl etc)

We use this method for presentations etc and find it very effective and for a sales medium, as long as your inventory is not fast moving it can offer a great alternative.

Kind Regards

[completerookie]

Don't jump the gun too much, the person with the requirement is creating a CD of his web site, so there will be bits (like Pearl) that will be unavailable to him (or at least his readers).
having said that, the method of copying the entire web site, images, folders etc is very effective for the CD

kev

[los_design]

Spot on Kev

As pointed out in the previous post, cd site performance will depend on the local machine set up with regards to the scripts in the bin.

Easy if you set up a lappy as a server, but not that likely

[Duncan Rounding]

I have also used HtTrack in the past and would recommend it.
However with some minor modifications you could also generate a web preview and use the contents of the PreViewHTML folder. This would also then include the warning message re the cgi-bin links. The main modification would just be to search and replace in all files and change the link file paths which could easily be done using a bulk file search and replace such as UltraEdit.

[completerookie]

Duh . . .
forgot all about that idea. - nice one !