[gregl]

I know the value of XCart is it's flexibilty, etc so if some of you would share your ideas I would appreciate it.

I have followed a couple of threads on this forum, but nothing became of them they just ran out of gas.
Question:
Is the concensus that all XCart sites have the html catalogue run, to help speed up customer access whilst just browsing the site? That seems to be the only logical reason for running it. This in most cases just mirrors the cart side of the site.
Or is it best to run html pages designed separately and use links and buttons when "Cart time" is required?

As a relatively Newbie still with XCart, I've been able to change a few things with templates etc, this forum has been invaluable for that, but I can customise html so much quicker and easier and no matter what I try I cannot get my index.php to look the way I want.

Example: obviously after running the html catalogue my index.html is a clone of index.php. If I want to change the "features" look and feel of my "frontpage", I know I can just create a new index.html, run some redirectors and I'm in business. But every time I run html catalogue for the rest of the pages it will obviously overwrite the newly created page. I know I can just copy my saved page back over but this seems a little long winded, pretty much like this post.

Sorry folks.

What is the ideal situation if there is such a thing, or is it the freedom of choice that makes XCart so popular?

Hope I haven't bored anyone to death?

Thanks for anyone's opinions