Actinic to BluePark

[allsquare]

We're looking to move to BluePark from Actinic and just wondered if anyone had any experiences of;

- Transferring the catalog products from Actinic to BluePark?

- Did you re-direct all the /acatalog/ urls or did you just let the search engines 'do their stuff' and simply re-index the new url's themselves?
(bearing in mind their are hundreds of /acatalog/ urls)

Any feedback would be helpful.

TIA

[Neil]

Hi,

I haven't any experience of transferring.

We found Blue Park when we were half way through developing our first site, realised how good it was and started all over again from the beginning.

Before you do anything, think SEO, how are your url's set up are they keyword friendly?

It will pay to have a proper plan drawn up from the word go.

You won't regret it, someone will tell you what we call actinic round here soon enough.

[Dave]

Hi,

There are quite a few people on here that have moved across from Craptinic including us. But for us we decided to jump ship a number of years ago so can't really remember much about the transfer of data.

Bluepark has excellent import routines for products and customers and as long as you have no problem exporting these from Actinic it will not be a problem and is pretty straight forward. If you have variants of products it's a bit more tricky but still possible.

If you have not already done so you can request a free evaluation site from Bluepark so you can have a play around and try importing some of your products etc

With regards to the urls we just let ours die a natural death and let the search engines drop the old url and re-index the new ones. You can put rewrites into the .htaccess file but as you say if you have go hundreds it may take a while.

Hope this helps and you decide to go for Bluepark.

[petad]

Hi TIA

There are a few ex-Actinic customers here (though they tend to call it something less polite!), so I'm sure you'll get a response soon.

Bluepark is definitely the right choice

Regards

Pete

[Adva Trading]

Contact Bluepark and ask.

[allsquare]

Thanks Adva.

I've been in contact with BluePark and they've been very helpful but wanted to see if anyone had any user experience.

[john]

It's so long ago that we moved from Craptinic to Bluepark that I can't really remember how we did the redirections, all I remember is that we made an speadsheet of all the actinix Urls and copied and pasted all the new Urls into a 301 redirect, this is essential if you have any sort of rating or Google history, its not difficult and is well worth while.
As for transferring products between actinix and Bluepark, that was a doddle by downloading a CSV and uploading this after mapping to BP, can't remember the details but it was not difficult, only the images may take a bit of sorting out, best to transfer all the main ones from Act and let BP resize for the smaller ones.
Moving from Act to BP will probably be the best thing you do, although the forum here is a bit blank sometimes (BP is too easy to manage)

[Adva Trading]

...if anyone had any user experience.

Not me. I had a bespoke website, but moved every product one by one