First attempt at adding second site

[Jeremy]

Hi

I have been running Developer for a year or so on a single website (www.magazineexchange.co.uk), and now wish to create a second site on the same domain.

The first site has around 8,000 products in it currently and that number will continue to grow steadily. The site is split into quite distinctly seperate sections, and my plan is over time to split sections off as entirely separate Actinic websites, in order to avoid any database problems as the number of products grows.

Each website will be effectively self contained, but they will all have a similar design and will link to each other in such a way that the customer doesn't realise that they are separate sites. Each section (site) will have it's own shopping cart of course but that isn't a problem customers rarely buy products from more than one section at the same time (if ever).

Each site will have it's own directory on the existing root URL, and hence should be covered by the existing SSL Certificate.

Anyone got any comments so far? If this concept is sound I am ready to start creating my first 'new' site and have a couple of specific questions (naturally I am paranoid about doing anything which might upset my existing site)

1) All the sites will share one CGI bin. I'm fairly sure that I am supposed to set up each site up with a different CGI script ID number, but I have been through all the help files and documentation tonight and cannot find any reference to it. Is this correct?

2) Is there any way I can 'force' products to have particular reference numbers on the new site, rather than having them start from '1' again? I am going to have to completely change my stock handling system otherwise

3) I assume I can share or duplicate templates, images etc across two different sites without any problems? I realise they will probably have to be duplicated in different directories on the server.

4) Are there any issues with what I am trying to do which might confuse search engines, log file analysis software etc?

5) Are there any other likely problems which I apparently haven't considered?

Many thanks in advance for anybody's help

Jeremy

[pinbrook_nick]

I may be wrong, but I reckon you are best off sticking to one site. It will keep everything simpler to use and maintain.

Access databases have a limit of 2GB, so you shouldn't run into capacity limitation problems for quite a while. Having only one actinic site that is very large will only cause performance problems on your local pc. Once the site is uploaded, as I'm sure you know, it is all static pages, and irrelevant how it is split up.

If your PC starts to slow down, just buy a faster one - you might even find that MDAC supports multiprocessor.

Another benefit of keeping one site is the ability to use actinic's inbuilt search tool, but I guess you could just use another one if that had to be scrapped.

Hope this helps.