BlueDreamer

You get what you pay for. I see your dummy site runs on Wordpress so I presume you installed that yourself? If that's true you could potentially do your own site, there should be plenty of plugins for doing comparisons so find one that works, add a theme and you should have a starting point.

Welcome to the forums! 18 years eh? same as me! How things have changed since then...

If you want advanced features like auto posting then you have to pay for a quality product. https://dlvrit.com is worth a look, they have a free plan so you can test it out, after that 20p a day.

Selling artwork online can be incredibly hard, you're up against numerous existing platforms for starters. That's not to say it can't be done if you can find an attractive USP and provide a better service. I'd recommend creating a solid business plan, once you have nailed that you may be able to get some startup funding to start building your platform.

For some things you may need professional help, but anything you can do yourself will save your budget

Indeed there are lots of tools available that you can use, https://wave.webaim.org/ will give you plenty of things to fix.

I just get blank page...

It's pretty blustery in Northamptonshire as well! Really you're not going to get much for "free" apart from the hosting, there's always a price to pay - most video hosting companies make money from "free" accounts via data surveillance. There are plenty of listicles about video hosting services such as https://biteable.com/blog/the-7-best-video-hosting-sites/ If it was me I'd go for Vimeo as they seem to the most privacy orientated, and their basic plan is only £72 a year, that's actually quite cheap in the greater scheme of things. PS Vimeo do offer a basic free account, you won't have the bells and whistles of pain plans but it's more than good enough for a site that wants to stream a few videos. https://vimeo.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/224818307-Basic-membership

You can add any selector to input elements, here's a few examples. input { border: 1px solid black; } <!-- default --> input:hover {border: 1px solid blue; } input:active {border: 1px solid green; } input:focus {border: 1px solid yellow; }

Welcome to the forums. You could look through some of the bigger theme sites, but for such a project you'd probably be better writing your own - that way you can keep tight control over performance, premade themes can be very asset heavy with bad performance.

What others have said, but here's what I spotted: "Avoid excessive DOM size" is often due to poorly written HTML structure. Your home page is quite long so I'd suggest optimising your HTML. Consider removing one or more custom Google fonts to shed a bit of weight/speed up rendering time, and.or remove unused Google font weights. You're currently calling in 5 fonts + variants, that's a lot for any site. Get your developer to self host as many Javascripts as you can, or change to a more reliable source. Some stuff hosted with 3rd parties can slow things down a lot. I didn't look to see but your developer can "delay" loading of javascript, that would mean your pages should load a bit faster, once the page has loaded then the javascript is downloaded afterwards. It's a bit like traffic management Where you can, review 3rd party widgets and content. Do you really need them, can you find a better alternative?

register.com are absolutely terrible, they "lost" one of my clients domain names as well, and getting it back was a nightmare. It seems getting through to the right person helps, my client kept pestering them and eventually somebody acted on it. So keep pestering them as much as you can - email/chat with them every day if you can. When you get the domain back move it straight away to a decent registrar.

Yes of course, some areas of law will change more often than others. A friend is a lawyer specialising in property/housing/mortgages - that sort of thing - although related laws don't change that often it only takes one legal judgement to significantly move the goalposts and that can kick off a need to review, re-asses and relearn.

500 errors can stem from a few things: .htaccess errors Try disabling it and run your URL's through index.php, e.g. www.example.com/index.php/some-page If the problen clears up your htaccess is most likely at fault Server not configured properly for your CMS Are you missing and required libraries? Are the PHP and MySQL versions running on the server correct for your CMS Is your server overloaded? Cheap/budget web hosts put too many sites on each server, resulting in all site competing for resources, can cause 500 errors. Old/dodgy CMS addons 3rd party CMS addons can cause numerous problems, make sure they are updated and remove any you're not using. One solution is to disable all addons, if the site works perfectly add them back one at a time till it breaks, that may point to the culprit. Code errors It's possible some poor code can cause 500 errors when front end templates are called. What I normally do for these is strip out a template to the basics, then reapply bits of code until an error happens, again that helps debug anythjing that's at fault. And lastly, turn on your CMS's debugging tools if it has them, that can often give some hints as to what may be the cause.

Normally my retainers cover a specified amount of work, whether that's a number of hours each month, or tasks you know about in advance that you do every week/month. Anything over and above that I normally include details in the retainer agreement, so if I go over the allotted hours then the client is charged £x per hour.

It's true web design/development has been touted as "get rich quick" by some people - often by snake oil salesmen - and in the early days of the internet (1990's/early 2000's) some people charged a small fortune for writing a few HTML documents which made it look like an easy money making fantasy. Those days are long past. Today, designers/developers spend years learning the trade, and because of the nature of the web things are ever evolving so we're all in a state of permanent learning. Web development isn't for everyone. Many people give it a go, some succeed, others find it's not their thing and move onto something else. Mentioning lawyers - yes perhaps you can get a basic qualification in a year, but after that you still have to keep learning to keep up to date with changes to the law and so on.

I don't use Wordpress but it may store a date stamp with the file record in the database, check there first - if a timestamp is recorded the you could use that value and use a CMS template variable to output in the date format you wanted. Other than that you could use the entry date or last edit date if that's updated at the same time as the file. Failing that you could create a custom field to update when the file updates.

It appears ok, I get the gist of what the site is about. Couple of accessibility things I noticed: 1. Inline links are underlined which is great, considering text link colour is the same as body text colour! It'd be useful to have a :focus style to highlight them. Ideally inline links should be a contrasting colour to surrounding text. 2. Contact page skips heading levels (caused by footer headings being H4's). 3. Social media links in the footer are empty, easy fix is to add name text with each link,. The text can he hidden offscreen. And on privacy... 1. You're setting surveillance cookies for Facebook and Google without consent.

Welcome to the forums! I agree with what Jack said, learning HTML/CSS is akin to an electrician learning how to use a screwdriver - without those skills you won't get far. I'd also add learning about accessibility so you can build sites that anyone with a disability can still use. You'd be surprised at the amount of people that have some sort of disability, whether blind/partially sighted, deaf, reduced motor skills which necessitates using a keyboard to use web sites, colour blindness (1 in 12 men, 1 in 200 women), and so on. Once you've got a good grasp of the basics, have a delve into Javascript. "Vanilla" Javascript and Jquery are pretty easy to pick up - there are dozens of other Javascript frameworks around but these tend to be more advanced so I'd say leave those until you've got a good idea of how JS works. Python is programming language, among many others. If that interests you then there seems to be plenty of work around for Python developers.

Yeah I don't understand why you need to make it so complicated. KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid is a good mantra to use here. Certainly if you want to extend a simple article site then start with a solid easy to use base that works without Javascript (so it's accessible to everyone), then use progressive enhancement for devices that can handle them.

What's the domain name of your site?

Get rid of all the 3rd party requests (mainly Google), that could make a huge difference.

Start with the content then design around that.

Why not use your CMS to collect and store submitted data? It's pretty straightforward in any decent system: 1. Create a channel/collection for the data submissions 2. Create some custom fields to capture the bits of data you need 3. Set up a front end form to capture submissions That's the basics. I do this sort of stuff all the time for things like competition entries, User Generated Content (UGC) etc.

You could always use simple Paypal pay buttons - https://www.paypal.com/buttons/ Once set up you can add links/buttons wherever you like.