vince_noir

I'm developing a small website for my parents. They own a property in Spain, so it's basically to promote that. I thought it would be a good opportunity to develop this myself as a bit of fun and a good way to get some skills in web design etc. They said if I could make any money at all from it through advertising, I could as long as it's fairly discreet. So can anyone tell me what might be the best way? I don't think the site is likely to be getting lots of hits, so I'm not getting my hopes up of becoming rich through this, just a little extra cash for a few beers here and there would be great I've seen google ads, my understanding of this is that you get paid a small fee when someone clicks on a link. I'm not sure this is suitable as you may need a lot of clicks and as I say, I don't think it'll be a busy site. Google are also very cagey about how much you'll actually get and I think it said in their t&cs that it would have to be the only advertising on there. I was thinking something more relevant to the site might be better. Is it possible to get paid for referrals directly from companies from links on the site? I was thinking of having links to local car hire companies, airlines that fly to the area and other relevant sites. Is it possible and straightforward to set something like this up? Are there companies like google ads that can do this for you?

Are you getting scripting errors? I'd personaly take a different approach. I'd name all the image files the same but with a different number at the end, e/g image_01.jpg, image_02.jpg etc. then have the JS change the image src by varying adding or taking away 1 from the image src. This does make it a pain to change the slide order, which may be why you're using an array in the first place, but if you're not bothered on the order, this is a slightly simpler way. There are loads of free to use Javascript slideshows, I'd try one of these, unless you're doing this to build your own knowlege, fair play if you are.

Are you getting script errors? If not and the problem is the image src it could be myImgSrc = "/images"; should be myImgSrc = "/images/";

I've been using Ubuntu for the last few months. I can't really fault it in any major way. It takes no time, Particularly if you're technically savvy, to get used to the OS. It's taken me a litte longer to get used to some fo the programmes, but nothing major. Using GIMP instead of fireworks/photoshop takes a little getting used to. From what I know, it doesn't offer as much as photoshop, but for my uses it's more than adequate. Even if you're not too technical, it's pretty easy. I know someone who intstalled it on his PC, his mother, who can browse the web and not a lot else, didn't know anyhting was different, she just though he'd changed the theme. The best thing by far is software centre. It is so easy to find what you want. I wanted an image batch processor the other day, found a programme called phatch on the software centre, was using it in minutes. All completely free, no trial period, nothing. However, I think the only way that it will become truly mainsteam is when it's offered pre-installed on PCs. I knwo it is at the moment, but it's really limited to a few netbooks. As soon as someone like PC world has the balls to offer it saying "you can buy the same spec PC with Ubuntu, and it'll cost £100.00 less as you don't have to pay for windows and office".

the best anti-virus protection is to switch to Linux or Mac. failing that, AVG is pretty sound.

Like I said, I agreee that the site should work in an older browser, but it's not worth the effort trying to make it look great with all the nice interactive features. Just have a simple style sheet for these users that makes it viewable and usable. A good example of this is to use an unordered list to create your menus. You can use CSS to manipulate the list to make a really good looking tabbed menu, that is accessable and can be re-sized and still keep it's design intact, then have a separte stylesheet for older browsers that will make them render it as a list. It will still be a functional menu for them, it jsut won't be as good looking as it does in a modern browser. You also need to consider accessability. By coding a site to cater for an old browser, you may be making the site inaccessable to others. For example, people who have poor eyesite and need to have enlarged text, or blind people who use screen readers. If you create a menu using images to make it look good in NS4.7, this will make it harder for these people to view the site, as they will not be able to re-size the text or the screen reader may not pick up the alt image tags. I'll bet that these users take up alot more than the 0.002% market share of netscape users.

340,000 people may sound a lot, but that is worldwide. Depending on the size of your site, then it's very unlikely that any of them will actually use you site. I agree that the site should 'work' in an old browser, but it really isn't worth the hassle and time to try to get your site to look as good as or close to a modern browser. As has been mentioned, the best way to go is to design you're site to modern standards, but make sure it still works in older browsers. This usually means that your page will have 2 or more style sheets depending on the browser, e.g. one for firefox, chrome, safari, IE7+ and another for all others. The other one may just have some basica format and possitioning. You may be able to do a few dynamic things in 4.7, but nothing like what a modern browser can do. Try going on the BBC website for example, where you can move around sectiosn of the site, or facebook where it automatically updates the page with peoples status updates. These are the kind of things that makes websites like this so popular. If the developers of such sites coded the site to the limitations of an archaic browser, they wouldn't be so successful.

I don't think that this was properly answered, but Netscape 4.7 definately doesnt support document.getElementById. I had to develop things for netscape 4.7 in work. A large protion of the staff had to use it because their machines ran OS2(!) with NS4.7 (we probably account for most of that 0.02% market share!). Not had to since early this year as those old machines had to be replaced (with XP machines running IE6! ) There really is practically nothing that you can do with that clunky old browser other than plain old text and images. There are hardly any interactive features like rollovers and show/hide functions. The web just wasn't all that dynamic back then.

I prefer to design my site using code and use a WYSIWYG editor to update certain things. Dreamweaver is good for shortcuts, like if you want to create a large body of text, with a number of lists and headings, it's easier to do this in dreamweaver than write our all those <p> and </p> tags. As long as it's nothing too complicated, and you use the correct doctype declaration, it should produce valid code. I'd then copy and paste the code into the HTMP/PHP file that I'm using.

I managed to get it working. I was using the full web address for the header.php include, so this must have been creating a new call to the server and therefore not registering the $pagetag variable or something. I did this because the include wasn't working if I used and URL like in HTML. I just stuck in the full web address so that it worked, didn't know you had to reset to the site root by putting ../ before the rest of the URL. Probably one of those basic things you take for granted when you know what you're doing (which I don't) :-p

Thanks, I'll have a go when I get home and let you know. The id is inside the <li> tag as that is how the style works. It's a 'sliding doors' stlye navigation menu, which requires it to be in a bullet list (have a look at the A List Apart article if you're not familiar with this technique). I don't think it's a problem with the if statement because if I put the vaiable inside header.php it will write correctly, and it doesnt throw up any errors.

Unfortunately not. Flash drives are disabled. I work at a bank, so IS policy is pretty tight. Why resist? :-)

I have to use IE6 in work, god knows why because all new machines now run on XP. Someone told me that there were compatability issues with other software we use, god knows how or why that causes problems. I had firefox installed, until someone I know very well was nearly sacked because of a breach of our IS policy. I read up on it ans it says you can't install any software downloaded form the internet, so I uninstalled it to be on the safe side. It's really annoying, because I need access to the internet to do parts of my job, and IE6 slows me down considertably.

The include and css works fine, but it will not write the id of the <li> tag. It works if I put the variable in the header.php file, but not when I put it in the index.php file that copntains the header include. It needs to be in the index.php so that it will vary depending on what page is loaded. Sorry if I'm not explaining myself very well, like I say, I'm new to PHP!

Hi everyone I'm having a problem with my site. I have a header include that contains the site's main navigation bar across the top. I want to apply a different style to the tab for the current page, which I have done successfully when using HTML and CSS by changing the id of the current tab. I have set the page up so that it declare a pagetag variable before the header include like this: <?php $pagetag = "apartment"; ?> <? include("header.php"); ?> I then have in the navigation menu: <li <?php if($pagetag == "apartment") { echo 'id="headerCurrent"'; } ?> ><a href="/apartment/">Apartment</a></li> This should then set the id as headerCurrent and the style are applied so that this tab looks different. It seams like the pagetag variable outside the include is not pulling through to the header.php include. If I set the pagetag variable somewhere in the heder.php file, it works, but obviously I need to set it outside this so that it changes depending what page is selected. I'm new to PHP, so any help would be appreciated. If I'm going about this completely the wrong way, please let me know, this just seemed the most logical way from the limited knowlege I have. Thanks I'm new to PHP