Sites w/ long, tech product descriptions?

[Cbee]

Can anyone point me to examples of Actinic sites that are heavy on info instead of just a catalog format with short bits of info?

Specifically, I'd like to see sites with products that include long, technical product descriptions (sometimes 2 pgs), related documents, support documents, and user tips. Also site sections that are support or reference only, and not related to a specific product. So a site that's heavily geared toward client education and support rather than only selling simple products/services.

All I've seen are more catalog-type sites, with very sparce info and max of a couple of paragraphs of description. That's great, but not even close to what we will need to create using Actinic.

[tonyd]

Hi

You could take a look at http://www.enginewise.co.uk - I'm not sure that any of the descriptions go on to 2 pages, but there are technical info pages etc., it might give you some ideas.

Cheers

Tony Depledge

[ditch]

You could try using the pop up box feature for your detailed information

[Cbee]

Thanks for replies

Nice site, Tony! That does include some of the ideas we are considering. Yours is the first site that is even close to what we doing. So do you use Dreamweaver along with Actinic? I'm a bit unsure of how well the two work together.

Thanks for the reply, Ditch, but popups are out of the question. They aren't very spider or SE friendly (very important for us), and aren't practical for our needs.

[tonyd]

Hi
Thanks for the compliment!
Yes, its mainly done with Dreamweaver, but it's not straightforward.

Firstly, a new Act_Primary.html was made by taking the original, adding the header, nav bar etc. in Dreamweaver and cutting and pasting the actinic bits to where I wanted them (bit of trial and error!).

There's a slight problem here as something is forcing the nav bar wider than it should be, moving everything else over and making the pages too wide, but I've just about solved that.

The layout of the body of the page with the images, copy etc. is done in Dreamweaver in a table or div about 600px wide.

I then cut and paste the code from Dreamweaver to the description box in Actinic, using the description only template

The images have to be uploaded seperately by FTP, but thats no problem.

Hope this helps

Cheers
Tony Depledge

[Cbee]

Hmmm.

Thanks for the explanation. Sounds like what I was planning to try - cut and paste elements into my own design. So you have to cut and paste *everything* into the Actinic software, and also use it to ftp images. Sounds a bit cumbersome. I was hoping that once you figured out how Actinic works, you could do the development (and uploading) in Dreamweaver, and not have to cut and paste everything. Use Actinic for things you can't do in DreamWeaver, but not be forced to use the Actinic interface for every little page tweak or new page.

As it turns out, we won't be going with Actinic anyway. While it looks great, I would need the Developer edition and the Client would need a couple of additional modules. Client would rather pay the $2000 or so for custom work based around Dreamweaver, mySQL, php, and a shopping cart like X-Cart or VP-ASP that has QuickBooks modules. Might also use Contribute if needed.

Sigh. It's going to be a longer process than I had hoped. Thanks again for your input.

[Kris]

Hi,

We use quite long popup descriptions on our site, you can see this in effect here, or alternatively check out our site by starting at the home page

We also have some of the older specification pages still linked to older products, but we are currently phasing these out and going purely popups for "more information" pages.

I know you said that popups were out of the question, but it all comes down to ease of updates for us... doing it the old way we had to do a Search and replace on all the individual html pages whenever we wanted to update... and this took a lot of time.

Hope thats what your after...

Thanks