Is Actinic for me?

[Nightstalker]

Sorry for the banality of the question but an answer now could save me hours or days of wasted time.

I already have an active "information only" web-site established and out there is cyberspace and I want to graft an e-commerce back-end to it with all tha tthat entails.

I am quite happy with the overall layout etc. and don't want to have to go the the time and hassle of re-creating the front-end code.

Is this something I can easily achieve with Actinic?

Any advice well received.

[NormanRouxel]

Actinic fits all the shop pages into a subfolder (acatalog) of your existing space so it would be very easy to add a shop to your site. You'd just need to add a link or two to the shop folder.

Getting it to fit in visually should be possible as well.

Post the URL of your existing site so we can see what you'd need Actinic to fit in with.

Norman

[Nightstalker]

My site is www.alta-linea.co.uk

Basically what I want to be able to do is to simply put an "add to cart" button to each of the products that will transfer a product code which will then be looked up in the cart database.

I don't really want a seperate catalogue section.

I will need view-cart and checkout buttons as well but these can be in the header frame.

I don't need or want a dynamic database driven front-end - TBH I've looked at a couple of the all-in-one e-commerce packages and don't like the front-end design tools at all. I'm just getting used to working in Dreamweaver GUI.

If Actinic isn't for me, do you know of anything that may be?

[garyhay]

I am sure Norman will agree that your site would be very easy to convert to Actinic.

Would take someone who has used the product (Actinic) a couple of hours.

We use Deamweavwer to creat Actinic sites so you should have no problems there as Actinic has a dreamweaver extension

[Nightstalker]

Originally posted by garyhay
I am sure Norman will agree that your site would be very easy to convert to Actinic.

Would take someone who has used the product (Actinic) a couple of hours.

We use Deamweavwer to creat Actinic sites so you should have no problems there as Actinic has a dreamweaver extension

You have mail...

[NormanRouxel]

I Had a look at your site (yum-yum). Catalog could create the overall look of your site with no trouble.

You shouldn't need expert help. One of the "Clean and simple" templates would take you most of the way there.

Also Catalog could easily generate product lines just like your existing ones with the addition of Selection boxes for the various flavours / sizes, etc and the "Buy" button. This would be easier than trying to fit product buttons into non-catalog pages. You have quite complex selection requirements, after all.


Indeed you could probably create the entire site within Catalog as it has a "Brochure" feature that allows simple non-product pages to be generated with no knowledge of HTML being needed.

One thing you need to understand is that Actinic deosn't look up a database on-the-fly when displaying products. It creates static HTML pages (search engine friendly), uploads these to your server, and those are what the customer sees.

Norman

[darrenmason]

Why don't you register with PayPal. All you have to do is cut and paste 4 lines of code into Dreamweaver and thats it. The payment section is done on their server.

Hope this helps