Complete Newbie - A Few Basic Questions

[Phil_M]

Hi all

I'm in the process of planning a web site which will sell educational courses and will also provide links to a number of products via affiliate programs.

I wish to enable my customers to either order a hard copy of my course, accompanied by a choice of CD's or cassettes (Audio material)

I have been looking at using either WorldPay's Click & Build or Actinic. I am a little confused at the moment as to what my best option is. I am swaying towards Actinic because I may also build a different online store later this year and the functionality offered by Actinic looks very good.

I also wish to use Worldpay to take customers payments - they also provide another service which I am interested in called WorldAccess whichwould allow me to take offline payments.

The questions I have are:
1. Which company to use to host my site. I have looked at Webfusion, Easywebs.net and 4surehosting, but am not sure which option is best. Webfusion appear to provide the 'product' which I need but do not mention anything about supporting Actinic Catalog. Can I still host my site with them, including Actinic and using Worldpay? Or do I need to use a company which specifically deals with Actinic?

2. I have seen a site offering Catalog V6 for £279+VAT with 6 months free hosting. The hosting package doesn't really meet my requirements - could I purchase Catalog from them for this cheap price and host it elsewhere. They will send a boxed copy - I presume I can (the budgets for my site are pretty tight as well)

3. Digital Downloads - this is definitely something which I wish to offer my customers. How much does this 'plug in' cost for Catalog and is it easy to install/configure?

4. SSL - What is the most suitable option, using a company like Worldpay or acquiring a shared SSL. If I don't use someone like Worlpay and have a shared SSL does this mean I would still need a merchant account with a bank to actually process the payment?

5. I purchased a template for designing my website in Dreamweaver a while back. Would it be very easy to integrate the look of this into Actinic? Alternatively, would it be easier to use a template from Actinic and design the rest of my site using that - if so, would I do all of my site within Catalog or use the Actinic template in Dreamweaver?

Apologies if my questions seem dead basic to most of you - I am pretty new to all of this and find that I have read so much that I have confused myself a little bit!!

Any help/guidance would be hugely appreciated!

Thanks
Phil

[I-CC]

To be honest, most people will be more prone to say go with Actinic as this is the Actinic community forum and as such many, if not all of the people on here already use it, so for better or for worse they would probably all say 'Actinic', but each has there own merits and down to your own perception of needs and functionality.

WorldPay (incl WorldAccess) has been discussed in quite some depth and many have problems with the delays in getting access to the funds and the high % paid on cards, but without it you would need to get a bank merchant account status to take the cards, unless you used a PDQ machine onsite, although WorldPay is not the only solution, it does seem to be the choice of most at present, but again it has its problems with delays in payments (4 weeks).

Q1. Most hosts should be able to host Actinic, just ask them and they should be able to provide you with their default network config settings, or talk you through it.

In response to question 2, yes you can get the software at the same price as you state without making use of the free hosting being offered. Its free for use with the software if you want it, if you do not want it, then you do not have to use it. Entirely upto yourself.

Q3. To use digital downloads you will need Business or Developer as it is not compatible with Catalog in its current form (v6).

Ref, integration and Dreamweaver, it is best to have a good knowledge of HTML as even when using the dreamweaver ext's it does not show you full pages of all the templates drawn in, just that individual template, so HTML knowledge is really a must.

Hope this lot helps.