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Okay so, the current idea of the site is to use one portion using my mini framework for test reasons, while the blogging section although identical will utilize wordpress on a subdomain. Aside from that minor aspect can someone give me some feedback on the website layout etc. Yes ALL stock images are taken from various sources just for a rough idea i'll be replacing them with my own ones after i've finished the PHP aspects. Kind regards, Include www.argentgray.com

Okay so this is the design I've been playing around with: http://www.argentgray.com/images/portfolio-wordpress.jpg and the top has a noise background and some basic drop shadow effects. My problem is, if I take a small portion of the background and repeat is x you can clearly see the individual bar that has been copied out and repeated. Now I don't have these problems as usually I never try any pattern based backgrounds as such or anything which would be required to be repeated but this time I have and would like to see what I could do to fix this problem. (the same goes with the drop shadow effect). Kind regards, Graymic

Well, no of course. Its not a case of not being able, it's just I don't want to rip them off for something I can potentially add to my CV at my expense of giving them a good deal too.

Now, I'm not scared of "scaring off" clients with a price by setting a standard, however this project is interested yet i'm not sure what the price should be as they want a custom framework for it. It's a dating website which "must" include: search preferences, ability to make matches and email members with these matches, instant messaging between members, forums, rating system of members, whos online features, payment area (including payment gateway), newsletter and update - sending to members, They want this within a month and I act as freelance designer / developer (all in php)... I'm thinking £4200 but other acquaintances of mine are saying this is too generous and it should be at least £6000. I'm thinking I might be charging WAY too much as well as although there are a few points which could cause an increased amount of time spent on them most of it is generally straight forward. Input on how much you'd charge would be great.

In relation to SEO friendly URL's and the earlier post about horrible URL's, one method to achieve the URL tidying would be to use .htaccess and $_GET[''] hand in hand. You would have something like so: page.com?url=param1/param2/param3 so in essence you've got one $_GET string which is actually like this "param1/param2/param3". You would then want to explode this using $arr = explode("/",$_GET['url']); To get each segment you could then array_shift or just target the section you would directly. If you know how many sections you want to a url parameter use arrayshift, if not. then use the references directly. So lets assume you want to work with a category then query a particular category id, you could have a url like this: www.site.com/category/1 You would set up the $arr like so: $arr[0] is your first argument. So you know the site page being requested is categories. $arr[1] would be the category id, base your query off of that.

Thanks, yeh i'm a little lacking in the areas of making fancy looking sites sadly, but generally I'm all for clean / shiny looking things, I may tamper with the layout a bit and add icons... I think some icons + twitter feeds etc might lighten the place up a little.

The text which says argentgray is actually just one textual part from illustrator, i'll take a look at modifying it but it was all apart of one text block in the psd. Only the colour was changed. In relation to the width, that can be sorted - i'll work on that one now, I shouldn't have used em really i'll convert and shrink down to 768 possibly for width. Regards, M

haha, sorry ol' chap, been coding so much today that I must have subconsciously developed a hatred for links hah! Edited.

Hello All, I've finished my website design recently (with a clean layout in mind). But really, i'm not a full scale designer, i'm a programmer / developer. I can do the odd design but mainly interested in programming. So, I figured, you lovely designers out there could tell me what you like / dislike about the website, so I can potentially make it better looking / user friendly in the future. Also, it runs off my own framework which I have been developing for some time now, I think quite a success in itself, maybe you can rate how that works navigationally, anyway. Regards, Michael www.argentgray.com

Hello all, I am currently 20 and have around four years worth of experience with developing applications both desktop and we based, I would say my skills are intermediate to advanced. I say four years. This is four years of practice not four years of learning. I started learning at quite a young age. Anyway I am doing a software engineering course at the moment and have had no end of offers for jobs (luckily) working on psychology based applications as well as some cognitive computing systems. Anyway, I have found that recently I have been asked to develop the back end systems for quite a large number of medium sized / small sized firms. Even my own university lecturer wants me to get involved with a private out of hours project he has been running with a small team of engineers. I my question is, I have noticed many functions being used over and over relative to the type of projects I am working on, and in actuality I have just been copying and renaming these functions time and time again. Would this be a good indication to start my own framework in this line of work. It specialises with cognitive computation etc but has a lot of web presence evidently. I have never really bothered to create my own frameworks as per say before, only very small ones for repetitive tasks. I know the logic of how they work and could probably get a crappy one set up to do these functions. Or would you say to stick to my current usage of open source frameworks and just keep building the systems from here. I have of course created systems that are completely bespoke and have had NO framework what so ever, which has taken considerably longer and I do not wish to keep doing so. Anyway, Any tips / advice you all can give? Regards, Mike

I have been learning PHP for around 2 years now and I am the only web developer at the company I work for. I am in the process of creating a locally hosted application with a LOT of calculations for building surveying, which dynamically loads forms and generates an equation with various "elements" that change in it depending on the category of choice. Like I said i've only been learning for 2 years the system I have made is fully object based however I am far from professional. So I would say intermediate level with some understanding of OOP wouldn't go amiss.

Pretty much what I meant hehe in my very bad description of it

Ok, so I am developing a custom CMS on my own Framework which it has to be this way due to whom I've been contracted out by. Anyway, my framework works like a charm has it's own database abstraction layer but one thing i've always had an issue of was deciding on a method of implementing certain more "complex" functions within my web applications, In simplistic terms the system has an element to it which analyses data from a hierarchal data set. For example, SuperClass->Class->SubClass We have more than three in this case. As there can be multiple SuperClasses. However for name sake I am dealing with one for the time being, my question is. Would the best means of representing this be from a database point of view. ie. SuperClass_Name | Class_Name | SubClass_Name -------------------------------------- SuperClassOne | ClassOne | Mike SuperClassOne | ClassOne | Joe SuperClassOne | ClassTwo | Ben this would in theory represent a hierarchy correct? I could then go on to create more children characteristics that are assigned to a class_name?

Well make sure your login in is secure, Ensure that if you have any form of file upload that you enforce the file types etc, there's various techniques out there available for use in securing upload forms etc. There's just a lot of stuff you need to do to make a secure CMS. Take it step by step and plan everything out =)

Valid points all around, I will work on them thank you, A few people I know made comments on the text and it seems to be the most commonly used term with my site, So I will address this first then work on the slider like you had suggested. Thank you again!