Thread: Converting site to Soholaunch

I have a Blue Voda site on which it would be great to have Soholaunch included. The problem is that to do that to an existing site, it get's A-bombed. You loose everything in the reset that is uploaded. After you install Soho, then you re-upload all your pages.
My site is video intensive. It would take a week or more to do this and I cannot afford for the site to be down more than overnight.
The main reason I desire Soho is to allow people to pay me at my site for goods and services. And it appears they have a lot of other goodies, also.
Any suggestions other than just using Paypal's ho-hum shopping cart?

Day,

You could install soho in an addon domain, use the cart part for all your products and link to it from your bv site.

Alternately you could use Cart Manager from Beth, who loves it or Mal's eccommerce which has a free version and actually use your merchant account with either of them.

Karen

So there is no alternative to download soho and work offline with it? then reset account when you're done building your site and upload new site?

No...it is an online utility, requiring you to work in the dynamic Control Panel provided.


PS: Be very careful throwing around the words "reset your account" as in VodaLand it is something that can be done by Staff to "restore" your account to the last set period (usually a week or so from the last time your account was archived/backed up automatically by the server).
If you casually request a "reset" your entire account (and any websites within) will revert to that set point, and all work since that date will be lost.

Thanks Vasili. I read in one of the threads that Beth said something like Soho could be done in a sub folder or something. I lost that thread, is this possible to run Soho in a subfolder of a BV site but not actually link to that subfolder or any of its contents to your BV site.

like could I make a folder in my public_html file and install Soho and build a site, but never link to that folder or any of its contents from my BV site. Work this way till i finish a soho site and then have my account cleared or whatever. then publish the soho site or is this all just some fancy dream and i just need to buy another domain and start from scratch?

No....that is not how it is done.

When you go through the process of installing Soho (via Fantastico! in your account cPanel), it gives you the option of creating a new directory, and in this case you will opt to do so....naming it for example: mysitenamestore which will then automatically be "separate" from the primary domain it is installed within (remember, a new directory has just been created within the public_html directory of a single domain ---- of whichever domain you choose within your account).

To link your primary domain BV website to this new store, merely create a link: www.myprimarydomain.com/mysitenamestore/ and it will automatically defualt to the index page within that directory (sub-domain, store/cart), as you cannot have 2 index pages within one domain's directory, understand?

* It is the same process for creating password protected directories, installing forums, blogs, etc.
** Remember, an "add-on" domain is much different than a "sub-domain" and/or sub-directory!

acon,

Vasili is correct, if you cleared your account youd wipe out everything. Soho is a live builder, meaning as soon as you hit the save button the site is live on the web. You also build it on the web, not on your hard drive.. so resetting your account would defeat the purpose.

Karen

Thanks for the answers. Im curious. Are there any SEO disadvantages to linking two domains together like that? Do you guys know if SE's or DMOZ editors would penalize me for having two domains linked in such a fashion or if there are advantages to just starting over and having it all be one domain...

acon,

Yes there are some disadvantages to building it as you suggest with two different builders. The longer the string is and the more parameters it has, the more trouble the SE have in spidering and indexing it. With that said, if you put ALL of your products and STORE info outside the builder as well, you can still get great indexing from the static page, and it will only be the cart area not indexed. Now, I dont let the robots in my SECURE pages anyway, so you can build around it either way. The advantage to using all one builder is that updating is much easier in soho especially making ALOT of changes. One or two would be just as easy either way, with the added step of having to upload your BV page changes.

Karen

Thanks for your insight. I have never built a shopping cart, so i didnt even think about the fact that I would probably robot.txt the search engines right out of that content. Thanks again for your help.