I've just started working to develop an Actinic ecommerce shop for one of my customers. As their web site was in need of a major overhaul we decided to make the e-shop be the complete replacement for their site, rather than just an add-on. This is possible as Actinic has the concept of 'Brochure' pages, which are information pages separate to the main body of the online catalog.

At first sight this appeared to be a sensible approach, but it is throwing up a few challenges. The first is that the brochure pages do not support a hierarchy. We can live with that, as the site is fairly simple. The second is that the product supplies a number of pre-defined navigation buttons (e.g. About Us) but doesn't appear to have a means of generating custom-built ones. This is a strange omission, as the product builds these gif files programatically whenver the colour scheme for the site is changed. Anyway, for us it's only a simple job of creating the required buttons in Illustrator.

The biggest obstacle is the structure of the navigation itself. By default the set of navigation buttons displayed is quite different depending on whether you are in the brochure pages or the product pages. From my point of view this breaks a cardinal rule that a web site should have a consistent navigation structure throughout. To improve this state of affairs you have to start making amendments to the Actinic templates. This isn't too bad for those familiar with HTML, but it's probably not for the casual user.

Beyond that, early impressions are quite favourable. It's certainly a very flexible package. There will be further posts on this topic as the development progresses.

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