nublue

Are you able to provide some code snippets?

It could be a number of things. One thing to check is that the colour being used is an exact code. For example white would be #FFFFFF, if you are using presentational view in Dreamweaver and simply select 'RED' then dreamweaver will have a preset red which is not necesarily the red you wanted. Instead if you define your colour as '#E31515' (which is a red) then it will display this exact colour in the browser. You can see some examples here: http://www.computerhope.com/htmcolor.htm I hope that helps

1st page position for what? If you a positioned for a keyword which is not strictly relevant to what you offer then this will clearly increase your bounce rate and decrease your conversion rate. A little more information is needed though if you want any decent responses specific to your website.

Yes I think you do need to pay for release if you got your domain through one of their free domain promotions.

Is this a bad time to try and flog you a VPS lol Sounds like they must be a pretty small host if they knew your name when you phoned. The about us page claims that they have 4 offices throughout Europe which from the sounds of your experience is a lie or at least an exaggeration on the truth! They will of probably disappeared in a month... never to be seen again. I hope you manage to get it sorted.

As mentioned, this can be done with CSS. Give the button a unique class and then give that class the relevant hover attibute to make it green or whatver other colour you want If you view the source and CSS (use the web developer tool bar for Firefox) you will be able to see how they have done it. I hope that helps.

I dont understand why you can just delete the folders. Your client websites are on www.clientdomain.com and also in folders on your domain, then why not just delete the folders? Then they are only accessbile from the clients own domain name? If the foldered version is for development, then why dont you make a locked sub domain so v2.clientdomain.com which is password protected and not crawled?

I think it is a Wordpress site. At least the footer suggests so

Wow, this a good project to get for your first full project! If he becomes president you might find yourself busy A few things that I might consider: It is a bit 'square' for me. Absolutely everything is in its own box which makes it feel a bit restricted. I think the main content (on the left) would look good without the boxes and maybe a single line to seperate them. Consider having your 'lire la suite' links as buttons to stand out more. All the main contents text is bold. make the article text regular weight as it is a bit loud at the moment. To me the olive green at the bottom is not a good contrast and does not really add anything. But overall, I think it is ok. I hope that helps, and good luck with it.

Hi Matt, Most of the off the shelf solutions will probably be quite heavy as they will try and be 'everything to everyone' in terms of features. But most things can be turned off so if you want really simple shopping cart functionality, set it up to only provide this and disable everything else. If it is to go into an existing website then it can obviously be designed to be in keeping, or alternatively you could remake the entire website in the ecommerce system as most ecommerce systems will allow for content managed pages on top of the product/catalogue pages. Alternatively if your website is already built on a CMS, many of the big name CMS systems have commerce extensions/plugins which will add limited shopping cart functionality to your website. If you could share a list of exact requirements that you are looking for and what CMS your current website runs on then people can probably recommend some specific carts. I hope that helps.

I see...... Well in that case This would be our top feature list for a really good monitoring system: Something that would output user friendly uptime stats onto a HTML server status page. So as well as monitoring uptime it also publishes it. So companies could use it as marketing collateral as well as a functional tool. Something that notifies in a number of formats. SMS Text, email, maybe an app that alerted. Something with granular monitoring, so it monitors a range of website functions (apache, mysql, slow load times etc..) with different limits set for each. (The cheap monitoring tools just ping, but this is pretty useless really!) Something that sent an email to the hosting ticket system to let everyone know that a problem had happened and what it was so the support guys are aware of it when the emails/calls come through. There's your brief, I expect a preview on Friday!

For general monitoring we use Nagios (http://www.nagios.org/) which monitors our network and all the individual servers (plus managed VPS servers). We have this linked to an SMS Gateway so we get notified by text if any of our Nagios alerts are triggered. We use it because you can setup various different alerts, as in not just up/down alerts. So we can set alerts for when there are too many MySQL connections for example, or for when Apache crashes and so on. The text service is great as it can text the various systems administrators when an alert goes off, and they have to acknowledge the alert in order to stop the texts. The downside (especially for a client) is that it has a big learning curve. We would normally recommend something like Pingdom for a client (http://www.pingdom.com/). As this is a much nicer interface and gives the basic uptime stats and reports any downtime. I think the main consideration with this sort of thing with a client is to take into account support. As inevitably any down time will cause the client to send an email requesting an explanation. Which then requires research etc...? And many alerts will be false (as in the site was never down, but the connection to it from pingdom was interrupted for some reason). I hope that helps.

Difficult to say wiothout knowing the EXACT details. 2000 products may take a day to import if they already have it all in CSV with the correct information (images, categories, options etc..) or it may take weeks, if they need it all extracting from various locations. I agree with previous posts, that for something like this you need a detailed brief. If the client can't supply that then maybe quote some intial consultancy to help them get to the stage where they are ready to commission a company to do this.

I really like it. I would be interested to see how the navigation will be handled on the internal pages. Do you have an example of an internal page too?

I'd say anything is worth doing if you can learn from it. As mentioned, I wouldnt go into it with the mindframe of making something to actually use, but certainly as an exercise which will expose you to a lot of different practices and skills, it is worth doing. I would suggest using something established such as Wrodpress for a commercial blog.

Thanks for that Chris The team would be happy to talk to you about this Aled if you need.

Can you show a link to an example of this being used? I am struggling to picture this. Do you mean like a tabbed box, such as the box below the 'Most Popular' heading on the right hand side here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ ? where a menu item changes the contents of the box without refreshing the page?

Welcome Mike

No idea if that is affecting it, is the short answer? Do you have a jquery effect on the menu? If not then it shouldnt be there. Is this a menu you have made from scratch? Any chance of a link?

Not worked with CSS for a long while, but would the correct syntax for this not be: { background-image: url(new_menu2.png) 0 -111px no-repeat; } with 'background-image', instead of 'background' I hope that helps

I take your point and it wasn't really advice, more of an understanding of the situation. My advice was in the second paragraph of that reply

Hi DWA From the contents of your message I'm guessing you have not made anything to be published online before? First off, don't use dreamweaver. This is an editor, and although it is possible to build something from scratch in it, you have no chance of being able to build the system you have described in it. What you are essentially describing is an ecommerce shop that sells digital downloads (audio in this case). So you need a shop that lets users browse your products (the audio), add the products they want to the cart, and then pay and download them. I suggest you try using something pre made such as: Magento Open Cart Cs Cart These are just examples, there are loads of other options out there so do your research. Make sure whichever one you choose supports digital downloads. I would highly recommend you get a web developer to plug in the payment systems and make sure it works from a technical point of view. Next job is to either get someone to make you a design for the cart (custom), or if you want to keep the cost down, buy a template and pay someone to make the minor modifications required such as swapping logos etc(you could maybe attempt this bit yourself in dreamweaver). Once you have done that you can host the website pretty much anywhere. Your developer is probably best placed to advise on what you need. I hope that helps.

I agree with this. It is just a template with the logo swapped out from what I can see. Maybe if you provided a list of the specific areas you have modified, we can then look at those areas and advise. It would also be good to get some background information on what the website was for, who it is aimed at etc.. So we can critique your website based on the fulfilment of its vrief and not just comment on the shininess of the graphics Good luck with it.

Yeah, had that kind of attitude a few times! Really annoying, makes it almost impossible to do a good job when you get a client like that. I would tell them the importance of good copy and images and maybe try and sell them some copywriting/photography services if they can't be bothered doing it themselves. Although more often than not with this kind of client you will no doubt end up caving in and doing what they ask, just so you can get paid for it! If so, just make sure you have a decent contract in place that makes it clear content was the client responsibility, leave your link off the site and dont put it in your portfolio.

This sounds like a HUGE website to undertake with a lot of different elements to consider. Before picking a system I would suggest writing a very detailed brief for it. When you say 'people' do you mean anyone? As the scope would then be huge. Or will this just be members of a specific family, as a personal project for example?