TheNewDesigner

If it's a link within your own site keep it relative. The upside of this is that if you make any changes to the domain name in the future, the links will still work. Rick.

I have a copy of Wordpress installed on a windows server (I know an apache server would be better and I wouldn't have to ask this question) and I'm looking ot get the SEF urls working without the index.php segment. I've looked online but can't really fathom how to achieve this. Does anyone have a good link or some pointers on getting this to work. Thanks, Rick.

Single best SEO tip? Try and do everything right, at the start of your project and start as you mean to go on. It's not necessarily a case of doing a lot, just do it correctly. I've worked on so many projects where SEO is a second thought and "just get it up there" is the word of the day and as a designer I can make sure that all the code and structure is clean and correct but this is only one part of the overall picture. Generate good relevant content Keep your articles and content semantic (so use Headings, lists, titles etc) Fill in the Meta content Get the links flowing (with or without keywords), both internally and externally. (This covers everything from twitter to forums, Press releases to site directories, be proud of your content and post links where relevant traffic will come from.) Get a Google sitemap and use it Install and use Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools Use the Firefox Rank Checker plugin to follow how well you're doing for the keywords you've selected, and make changes where you need I'm a big believer in keeping things simple. A little goes a long way! Rick.

It's a good article about being proactive, thanks for the link. Rick.

Ash, I've been looking at a couple of options, and to be honest I haven't found "the best solution" yet. There's a lot of them out there but thay all seem to lack a certain functionality, or they aren't that fast, the code is horrible on some of them and generally it's a real pain in the arse. The option I ended up going for was Joomla and Virtuemart, primarily because I've used Joomla before quite a bit and it is easy to customise/design for. The other option to go for would be something like Shopify, which is a hosted solution that will charge a small amount per order. The guys there will customise your shop for you, let you use your own domain, and it seems to be a strong solution. Hope this helps a bit. Regards, Rick.

Welcome to the Forum. Regards, Rick.

Without a doubt, the H1 tag should not be used on the same element (logo/strapline) for every page in your site. The purpose of the H tags is to bring structure to the content of the page, and not the common elements like mastheads or slogans. When it comes to SEO, semantics is important and the H1 and H2 structure becomes a guide to the content; with the H1 defining the topic of the page, and the H2 showing sub topics (and so on with H3 and H4...) Rick.

That's no problem, glad you found the info helpful. Regarding your price, I think if you're happy with it and the client is happy with it then it's fair. Good luck with your first web site project. Rick.

Hi there, What you charge for a piece of web design work, especially when you're starting out can be a tricky decision. Do you go in high, with your fingers crossed, and try to make an extra buck, or do you go in bottom price because it's good experience, and you should be thankful for the work? What I'd suggest you do, is scope out the project to see how long you think it will take in terms of hours and what costs are associated with services; try to cover all bases here and include things like domain name registration, hosting etc. With this info you should have a cost in time (hours) and a cost in services (Pounds/Dollars). The services have a set monitary value which you need to cover but the cost of your time doesn't. To find this out you'll need to decide what an hour of your time costs to you, so how much you think an hour of your time is worth. Multiply this by the hours you think you'll be puting in and you'll have a monitary value for your time on the project. Add these together and I think it will give you a good idea of what the project is worth to you. When you put the price to your prospective client, try breaking the costs out between design, build, and services so your client can see where the money is all going and it's then much easier to change the price by moving things around. An example of this could be something like adding google analytics to the site. Although with this there's no money associated to services, it will take some of your time. If the cost is too high, you can suggest leaving Google analytics out, but remember to push the benefits of having analytics active. This is just an example but you'll get the gist of things as you go along. In my experience the average cost of a freelancer in the UK is around £25 - £60. Bear in mind that if this is freelance work and you're declaring it, you will pay the tax man roughly 30% (if you're already working) so keep this aside. At the end of the day business should be a fun thing, and people are people so be open and honest about what you think the project is worth to you. There is no "set price" for the kind of work we do and meeting somewhere in the middle, that suits both of you, is a good start for your first project. When I think back to my first freelance job, I think I charged £12.00 per hour (This was a good 5 years ago though). I hope this helps. Rick.

Welcome to the forum. Rick.

I like the design a lot. It also helps that you've got some good content on here a swell. Rick.

Thanks for the welcome. Regarding your question about Dotnetnuke; I like it a lot, version 5 is the best so far (I've been working with it since version 1) and it is quickly coming up to par with regards to SEF dynamic navigation, and standards compliance. It does take a bit more work than say Joomla! or WordPress to understand, but I think it's front end user interface (by this I mean the way you can add modules anywhere you like) makes it stand apart from the others. There's lots of users and a great community behind it so there's huge opportunity to contribute to the growth of the framework. All in all, I like it and use it every day.

Hi Lee, Welcome to the forum. Regards, Rick.

Thank you. Rick.

I'd like to say a big hello to everyone here at the webdesignerforum.co.uk. Today marks the start of my freelance career, as I've spent the last 5 years working for several different companies including design studios, online marketing companies and internal marketing departments, as well as a short spell freelancing when I was younger. My main focus is going to be on the Dotnetnuke Skinning front (particulary converting artwork into skins), I launched www.psdtodnn.com in November of last year and www.thenewdesigner.co.uk is my "umbrella" brand for all of my future projects. I've spent a few days looking over the content of the forum and contributing where I can, and my overall impression is good. I'm hoping to contribute as much as I can to this forum and look forward to helping out where possible. Regards, Rick.

I think you're IT guys are being overly cautious and not very trusting. What I'd suggest is that you let them screen the CSS file before it goes live. Might be an idea to work on a local version of the project, then run it past them for approval. As long as no-one else gets access to the CSS file when it's up the chances of it being altered are minimal. I did a google search for the issue they were suggesting and this looks liek their source of info: http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Styling+Confluence+with+CSS#StylingConfluencewithCSS-ConsiderationsforUsingCustomCSS There's a bit of info in here about setting CSS for pages, might be useful to you. Regards, Rick.

Security issues with a CSS file? That's a new one to me. Maybe you can get them to add the link to the CSS file themselves, and provide you with FTP access to the directory. Rick.

Gopal, Good to hear that you got it sorted. Regarding your other question, the ideal situation would be to have an external CSS file which you can include for everything style related. Having a whole load of additional repeated CSS will make the HTML bloated and in the future un-managable. There should either be a way of including a CSS file, or a main php/html template you can add a style link to manualy. Regards, Rick.

I'm not a PHP developer, but the theory behind it would be that you assign a class of "active" to the current active tab and, if you want to differentiate between active and parent, a "parent" class to the parent items. Then setup CSS classes with the setting for the active and parent items. Rick.

I'm not entirely sure what you're looking to do here but I'll outline a couple of options below and see if any of them answer your query. If you're looking to repeat a background image horizontaly or vertically you can set this in the CSS, whether it's inline or within a stylesheet.css with the following CSS: background-repeat:repeat-x; or background-repeat:repeat-y; This covers repeating a tile of a background image. The other thing I think you may mean is having multiple instances of the same background image on a page. This can be done by creating a CSS class containing the settings for the background image. You can then add this class to the individual elements to show the background image. I'm also not sure what's confusing you about the path of the image. It's a relative link to an image contained in the 119237936 directory within the attachments directory of the downloads directory. If you can rovide some further specifics to the issue you're having if none of the above answers your query, I'll see if there's something else I can propose. Regards, Rick.

If you're looking to target the lists on a specific page there are a couple of options to you: You can add an ID to the body element such as <body id="nolist">. You can then set the li for this in the CSS like this: body#nolist ul li{ list-style-image:none; } Another option would be to create a css class which can be applied to each of the lists There's also a technique whare you can target the list within a containing element, in the case of the thumbnails, the wrapping element is a div with the class of "thumbscontainer" so you can target the list items within thsi like so: .thumbscontainer ul li{ list-style-image:none; } Hope this helps. Rick.

I'm a big fan of Dotnetnuke, but I wouldn't give up so easily on Joomla and Virtuemart as a solution, I've used this for one of my sites and it was easier to setup than Dotnetnuke, especially when it comes to the template creation (Although this is only relevant if you're going to be creating the template yourself and not using a pre-built one). Both options provide you with plug and play solutions for the framework and the eCommerce side of things. From an SEO point of view I opted for Joomla because I could use the SH404 plugin to create custom urls for each of the pages within virtuemart, which I was struggling to do with DNN quite as easily (This said it was done using DNN4 not the newer DNN5). If you can, why not install both locally (Joomla! using wampserver and DNN using the windows platform installer), with a list of the requirements for your project, then you can see which one ticks more/all of the boxes for you. Rick.

IMHO when it comes to the skinning of your site I'd shy away from using a template if there's a budget and timeframe allowing you to go down the custom skin route. Why? 1. You get to control the design of the site, rather than the design 'kind of' looking how you imagined/wanted it to look. 1. You'll get your own unique skin designed and built, setting you apart from other template skins. 2. Rather than modifying your content to fit into a skin's pane layout options, or going through the hassle of re-working the pane layout, you can mould your first and original skin around the requirements of your site content. 3. A lot of the template skins are built using tables and can be quite tricky to customise regarding layout. 4. Customising colours may be tricky if the original .psd files aren't included. If you do go down the template route though you should definately look at the offerings on www.snowcovered.com and you'll find additional resources at www.dotnetnuke.com Rick.

To get this working on Dotnetnuke you'll need to work on 3 seperate areas: Skin Design Module Development Content Development From a skinning aspect, this is 100% achievable. You can pretty much turn any design into DNN skins and containers and there are many companies out there that can do this. For the functionality you'll need to develop modules, or have modules developed for you by a development company, or by yourself if you have the skills/knowledge. The third piece will be the content, which will make or break the site. Regards, Rick.