ReformedGeek

Our (TCRM) ecommerce system handles food deliveries. We have one in place in a sandwich shop in Cardiff. Users can also build their own sandwiches. It was hard work to write as it just made me hungry all the time.

I started to read this thread and realised our registration form was still in a table layout (in my defense it was written before I started here). I am now in the process of updating it. I hate tables for layouts as that is not what they are intended for. They are for tables of data, not to control the layout. CSS gives you so much more control of the layout. I've worked with forms where one row is used for the label and the next for the form element itself. Moving the label cell to the side of the form element is such a fiddly process and inserting a new element is a headache as it can affect the layout of the whole table. You end up having to change colspans in 23 places. And you also end up drowning in mark up. Gareth

Hi Rich Our ecommerce system (www.TCRM.co.uk) displays the prices of the products and the resulting shopping cart in the currency of the user's choice (from the ones we've made available). They are then taken to PayPal in that currency. Even though this was the more complex option to implement I believe people are happier if they can clearly see how much things cost right from the start. Exchange rates do not have to be set every minute. Think of a store like Tesco which labels clothes in both sterling and euros. They set it at an acceptable rate then absorb any differences (good and bad). The change isn't vast over the course of a couple of weeks or months. Hope this helps Gareth

Can I ask how complex the user id is going to be? If I'm assigned a number like 113, all I need to do is start entering numbers and start getting at your user information. I realise that this is a straight forward application, but I'm for building a secure system no matter what it is.

Hi 47 This site has great potential, but yes does need a bit of work. The main problem for me is you don't get to see much content without scrolling down. You need to tighten the design up a bit. I would recommend: - Moving the search box to the right hand side of the menu bar - Dropping the full width top advertising banner - Move the menu bar much closer to the top of the box - Putting the login/register text in one tight line between the top edge of the blue box and the menu bar In addition I would make the headline in the news box a little bigger Hope this helps Gareth

Totally agree with you JG in that there is no perfect answer. As I said it's one of those occasions where the relational model falls down a little bit. And my method is especially memory hungry because of the select * and the extra 30 character description. Blofeld, could you post a list of the fields that you would be displaying? I'm more of a fan of letting the database server do the data work as far as possible as that's what it's optimized to do.

In this instance I don't think that two trips to the database and matching the arrays is the way to go. You have two sql queries and result sets to handle and maintain and then you have to step through both sets of results at least twice- once to generate the arrays, then again to output the contents.

I'm with JG on this one. Getting one big record set is better than many little ones. I tend to set a 'last product id' flag and only display a full 'header' record if the current ID is different from the previous ID. This is one of those occasions when the relational database model is not ideal and the object-oriented model is more appropriate.

If you were a web developer then using templates is not so bad because you're aim is to demonstrate how well the site is built and how well it functions. The design is just one part of that (Sorry if I'm stepping on your point a bit there Mike). However, if you are a web designer then it's all about the look you can make a website achieve, that's the role you perform, and using a template to carry out that role is not the way to do it. My advice would be to study many templates, analyse what makes them good in your eyes, and try to make them better. Produce as many mock ups as possible. When we look at designers we don't just look at the websites they've actually created, but the looks they can help us achieve. Mock ups are perfectly acceptable for that.

Yes I still use tables for tabulated data too, but now the table is wrapped in a nice div and not another table!

I cringe when I think of the tables I used for my layouts ten years ago. CSS and div use minimise the HTML needed for layout. This make the result of the more functional part of your code easier to see and debug. You're not swimming in a sea of 'echo "<td>";' and wondering why your layout is going wrong because 50 lines ago you set the colspan to 5 instead of 6. PS I agree with people on the pork chops

This one might be a good one to start with: http://www.phlonx.com/resources/nf3/ it reminds me of the database course I took in uni.

IE always seems to have a problem with header redirects. Header redirect a php page to a pdf you've just created works in browsers which process the header information correctly but not in IE because it thinks it's getting a php file and finds a pdf. IE gets its file type information from the url and (by the looks of it) its protocol information too. That's why the page refresh option works.

Hi Adam The more correct way is to have three tables. A members table, a specialities table, and a linking table members_specialities. They would have the following fields: Members (UserID, First_Name, Last_Name, Email_Address.... etc) Specialities (SpecID, Spec_Name... etc) Member_Specialities (UserID,SpecID) This would have a compound primary key. This structure is closer to third normal form and solves a number of issues: 1. You don't have to change the table structure or code to add a new speciality or remove one 2. Allows you to store multiple specialities in the future 3. Joined queries can be constructed more easily to use the tables for different purposes It's a bit more coding but the code will be easier to understand and adapt in the future. Hope this helps Gareth

Hi Sir Jonny look4design.co.uk has been created using classic asp and interiordesignphotos.co.uk has been written in php. I'd recommend using php if you're writing the site yourself, but writing a site like this does require a high level of knowledge. Or if you'd like us to take a look it for you we'd be happy to help. We created www.weddingbellesofwales.co.uk which is a product catalogue of dress designs if you'd like to take a look. Thanks Gareth