How To Create Sections Within Actinic
Actinic Sections Explained
Each section you create in Actinic becomes a page on your website. There are fields that you should always complete when creating a section, these help search engines to understand the content on your pages and they will also help your visitors. Actinic allows you to setup new sections by only putting in the section name and not filling out these other fields, this is not ideal. The fields which you should always try to complete are:
- Section Name
- Section Image (optional)
- Section Description (optional)
- Page Name
- Page Title
- META Description (hidden on your website)
- META Keywords (hidden on your website)
Items 1, 4, 5, 6 & 7 should be completed on every section you ever create. If you would like to use section images or section descriptions, then you have the option to use these also (items 2 & 3). When you create a new section, you will see 3 tabs - General, Page Settings and Details. You will find all of the above mentioned fields on one of these 3 tabs.
To understand what these fields actually do on your website, please see the below image of the example Actinic store. They are numbered in accordance with the above list. If you already have an Actinic store, then choose one of your existing sections and note the details in these fields and how you see them on your website. Items 6 & 7 are not visible on a page as they sit in the background html code that produces the page. Items 1-5 can all be seen on your website, however items 2 & 3 are seen a level up from the below image.
These details are important on a page, they are also very important to search engines. If you employed a company to do the Search Engine Optimisation on your Actinic store, these fields would be the very first things they assessed. Although SEO encompasses a number of different factors, these are the fundamental basics and should always be in place. Not having these fields completed is like trying to drive a car with no tyres.
Do I Need To Create A Section Or A Sub-Section?
When you want to create a new section, right click on an existing section and you will get the option to create either a 'New Section' or a 'New Sub-Section'. A 'sub-section' sits one level below (i.e. within) the section you currently have selected. A 'section' sits at the same level as your currently selected section. Clear as mud eh? It is important to understand what a 'Top Level Section' (TLS) is. A TLS is a section in the first level of your content tree. Any sections that sits within a TLS would be classed as a 'sub-section' of that TLS. The settings for a 'sub-section' are identical to those for a 'section'.
Shop Top & Sections Explained
The image to the right illustrates a section structure in Actinic. The green wad of dollars labelled 'Online Catalogue' is called the shop top. The first set of sections i.e. 'Hard Back Books', 'Clothing', 'Homeware' and 'Computers' are what we call Top Level Sections or TLS for short. As the name suggests, they are sections that sit at the very top level of your store.
Within the 'Hard Back Books' TLS you can see 4 sections - 'Great Expectations', 'Pride and Prejudice', 'Far From The Madding Crowd' and 'Gone With The Wind'. These sit within a TLS, a level down in the content tree, these are what we call sub-sections. Remembering that a section equals a page on your website, therefore when you select any section, the page displayed will show the sections or products sitting within it, much like a family tree.
Single Product Per Page Setup (SPP)
If you would like to understand what SPP means, we have written a specific tutorial on the subject, you can read it by clicking on Actinic SPP Setup.
Key Points To Remember
- ALWAYS fill in all fields when you create a section, do not leave certain parts to finish later, they rarely ever get finished and you end up with a half complete website which search engines start visiting and ranking accordingly
- When you create a section, Actinic takes the section name and uses it to produce the page name automatically for you (you can override what it does for you though). There are certain characters not allowed in html page names, if you have used any of these in the section name, then Actinic will replace them with an underscore. Often you can remove these unnecessary underscores and make the page names more concise. Always take the opportunity to do this as the page name is a key part in SEO
- DO NOT copy-paste an existing section to quickly create yourself a new one, unless you go through each of the above steps and manually control the contents in each of the fields. Each time you copy a section, Actinic adds 'copy_of_' to the page name, which means if you copy a section a number of times, you can end up with a hideous page name such as 'copy_of_copy_of_copy_of_copy_of_Hard_Back_Books.html'. This is terrible for SEO and should be avoided at all costs
- BEFORE setting up a section, make sure you have the name, the section image (often a smaller version of a product image), the section description (if applicable), the page title and the META information all prepared before you start to set it up
Extra Tips & Tricks When Managing Sections In Actinic
- If you try to change the order of sections in your content tree, as you drag and drop them you will find that they move down a level and become sub-sections of where you drop them. To ensure that they stay at the same level, hold down the shift key while you drag and drop
- If you have a section currently being worked on, but you do not wish for that section or anything inside it to be uploaded to your site yet, simply select the 'hide on website' checkbox on the 'general' tab of the section, until you are ready for it to go live. This is a good idea if you either want to be adding new content or if you want to prepare a new product range, but do not quite want it live yet. Seasonal sections are another good example of using this facility
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