Simple Guide to Actinic Designer?

[redbiker]

I'm new to using Actinic designer. I'm finding the basic user guide doesn't have anything like as much information as I need in and the advanced guide is too complicated for a beginner.

Any tips to finding a user guide that actually makes sense?

At the moment i'm trying to edit the text in the "ReachingUs" variable and can't for the life of me work out how. Would it be too complicated to be able to click on a text variable and select edit!?

[RuralWeb]

Any tips to finding a user guide

Try one of the design courses actinic run

[grantglendinnin]

Glad I noticed this thread. How/when/where are these 'courses' done, where can one find more info?

[RuralWeb]

http://www.actinic.co.uk/ecommerce-training/index.htm

[grantglendinnin]

Oops, thanks Malcolm. I am confident I know at least the basics of all the topics covered on the actinic web design course but only through building our site using Business Plus/Dreamweaver - is the Designer version so different to BP, considering I have accessed using BP everything mentioned on the web design course list. Hmm, might be worth while giving Sales a call

[RuralWeb]

Designer is exactly the same as bp really just you cannot process orders and it's cheaper because of that. Also you can only buy client versions if you have designer

Lots of discussion previously about the worth of designer - if you have bp then it's not worth buying

[jont]

Andy - the best resource is the forum and trial and error for learning.

Lee started to write "Learn Actinic in 24 hours" but soon realised it took 24 hours to just get the MOTO form fixed.

[leehack]

LOL Jonty, 24 hours you're kidding, i'm still here in the trenches with it.

[jont]

My fault for the typo, it was late "Actinic in 24 Years"

[redbiker]

Surely there must be a few basic examples somewhere I can learn from!?

I only want to change the colour of a part of the background and get rid of some ugly looking bullet points on the top level catalog sections!! Apart from that I'm happy enough to go with a basic template for now.

I've clicked, right clicked, double clicked, searched through all the various menus and can't find any hint of anything other than where to set the main corporate logo and add some text here and there. If Actinic are selling this as being "intuitive" I must have got the wrong software. It has the feel of being hacked together by a load of students on their gap year.

[leehack]

You tend to use a combination of Firefox and Firebug plus the design tab and the actinic stylesheet. A lot of text is maintained in DESIGN | TEXT.

What are you finding difficult, the whole package or just certain areas?

[jont]

Most of the v8 and v9 stuff is styles in CSS via the stylesheet .. in v9 this is easy to find... in design tab mode click on the item in the preview pane and the code will display - you can then right click on the class="" and select to look up in the stylesheet ... here you can edit just about every design element.

[RuralWeb]

If that's all you are wanting to do then both are covered I'm the help files and are in the main options rather than in the design tab. You are making things too hard for your self

[redbiker]

Just generally finding the code that controls each part of the layout(s).

Sometimes I can click on the part I'm interested in and the code appears in the code preview pain. Sometimes I have to delve into the Library menu, sometimes the text menu. Some of the text is in the text menu, sometimes it is in business settings. The whole thing just feels like it's been laid out with either very little thought or using some kind of twisted logic that I need a bit of guidance to get my head around!

[RuralWeb]

The bits you said you wanted to change are in advanced themes and layout options.