Replacing my old site.

[mysticscooby]

Ok. So the way I am doing this is going to take months. Hoping someone can guide me.
I already have a store online and I want to replace it with a shopsite store that is easier to maintain. I already use shopsite a my shopping cart and that is why I chose shopsite to rebuild. Can I build my store without messing up my shopping cart and then just go live all at once replacing the store I currently have without having months of down time?

Also, is there a way to upload all of my product info at once so that I do not have to attach 1000's of pictures to thousands of products manually. This is taking me forever.

Also, right now due to setting up my current store a couple of years ago, my shopping cart is on a different URL then my store. Can I build my entire site to be uploaded or whatever on the correct site but it won't effect my shopping cart as it is now?

So many questions, I know. If you need to see what I have right now, my site is at lifesmysticaljourney.com but if you click on the shopping cart you will see it is current on mysticscooby.com.

Thanks for trying to understand and answer my questions. I just don't want to have to close my store for months in order to get this done.

[BFChris]

What exactly do you have in mind?

Are you using Order Anywhere buttons on your current site? What domain actually has the Shopsite installation/license?

How much of the product data is in he Shopsite database?

[ShopSite Lauren]

It looks like you currently have at least one page at the same domain that your ShopSite store is currently installed to, http://www.mysticscooby.com. Is the page there something that you need? If not, then you can replace the current home page at http://www.mysticscooby.com with a ShopSite created home page, as well as all the other pages in your store created by ShopSite. Below are steps I would suggest taking assuming that you can build your entire ShopSite store at http://www.mysticscooby.com temporarily.

1. Upload your images. You can contact your hosting provider and get FTP access to both domains. Copy all the images from http://lifesmysticaljourney.com/media to http://www.mysticscooby.com/media. Once you have uploaded all the images, log into your ShopSite store, highlight all the images, and click "Create Resized Images." Note, you shouldn't resize more than 300-1000 (depending on the size of the images) at once, because if you do too many images the server will time out before the images are finished. If there are too many images, I will do them in batches.

2. Add all your pages. For this step, you will want to recreate all your existing pages in ShopSite. The main fields that you want to add are the page name, page file name, page title, and text on the page. For example, you can go to the "New Products" page on your non-ShopSite home page, http://lifesmysticaljourney.com/newproducts.html, then in your ShopSite store go to Pages > Add A Page. Below is the page information you will want to add:
Page Name: New Products
Page Title: Life's Mystical Journey ~ New Products (although for SEO reasons, I would suggest changing the page title to "New Products from Life's Mystical Journey")
Page Text: <p>Welcome to our New Products page. This page will change constantly as new products are added. Each product will stay here approximately a month and will then be replaced.</p><p>Each item here is also listed in their permanent category.</p><p>If there is something that you are looking for but cannot find, please send me an email and I'll see what I can do. I am really good at finding hard to find items.</p><p>Blessings of the Goddess in all that you do. </p>
Page File Name: newproducts.html This one is most important because you want to keep your search engine rankings.

3. Add your products. Once you have added all your pages, you will want to add your products. If you have a database or spreadsheet with the product information (such as image file names, descriptions, anything that you don't currently have in your ShopSite store's product database) you can upload that information in your ShopSite store.

4. Once your images, pages and products have been added to your ShopSite store, and your ShopSite pages are setup and looking/working how you want, you can contact your host and have them migrate your ShopSite store to the domain you want your website to be at, http://lifesmysticaljourney.com.

[mysticscooby]

Great... Good to know...
Oh no! Problem. I just published a page and now when I go to my shopping cart that is attached to my store, i can't get back, it goes to the new unfinished page... How can I unpublish the page I just published so that just the shopping cart is working.

Next question, can i migrate the shopping cart now so that i can work on the new site and the move it all when ready?

[mysticscooby]

Ok. Well, while it's there. I have a page created but cannot figure out how to change all of the colors, only some of them. Can you help? I would like all background to be the dark purple color but can't see to change it all.
The link is http://www.mysticscooby.com/index.html
Really don't want any of the blue or white...

[ShopSite Lauren]

You can't unpublish a page.

I would suggest switching your theme to the plain theme, then add your own code to the header and footer to 'wrap' your look around the page. I think this option will allow you to get a look that is closest to what you have now on http://lifesmysticaljourney.com/
http://www.shopsite.com/templates/cookbook/page-notemplate.shtml

[mysticscooby]

I read that i can download a page and edit it in dreamweaver, which I used to build my current site, and then upload the page to populate using the site, but I have not found where or how to do this. I seem to only be able to get an excel file.

[ShopSite Lauren]

You can download the templates and edit them in Dreamweaver, but if you want ShopSite to build your pages, you will not be able to edit them in Dreamweaver and upload them back. ShopSite builds the pages each time you publish based on what is in the pages database.

[mysticscooby]

So I cannot down load a page template, change it, and upload it back to use on shopsite?