person4659

Its important to not go into it expecting clients to just fall on your lap.
 
Im currently putting everything together to get into freelancing again, but i tried about 4 years ago when I left college. I was naive, and just thought oh ill make a website, put a couple of classified ads up...happy days! If only it was that easy...
 
You won't be supprised to hear that I didn't get much out of it.
 
Im now older and wiser and understand that its not easy, and its going to take a lot of hard work. As suggested above, if you can do some free work to help build a portfolio, or indeed just create some dummy sites which have no real purpose other than to show off your skills as a designer.
 
But make sure you take your time, do read up on things etc...and another really good suggestion someone mentioned above - find a site you like, and just copy it. See how close to the site you are copying you can get. Its a really good exercise to improve your skills.

You're Welcome
 
 
"Mastering" Photoshop would take a very long time anyway - I've used it for years now and there are still many features that I know very little about.
 
HTML and CSS are relatively easy languages to learn in comparison to most programming languages so you should be able to study them alongside Photoshop and once you start to feel comfortable, try designing some basic designs in Photoshop and coding them up with HTML and CSS.

Thanks for all your feedback, I shall be trying really hard to redesign and really think about what is working and what isn't and I will let you guys know when I have finished it so you can give me more feedback. I appreciate all of your comments and will keep all of them in mind.

for ($i=1; $i == 1; $i++) {
 
This will cause you problems - you're setting $i to 1, then you're asking it to exit if $i is equal to 1.
 
Try:
 

$i = 1; //set the number for the first div foreach($row as $cell){ echo "<div id='part$i'>\n<p>$cell</p>\n</div>\n"; $i++; }

Don't thank me - thank Yoast. Build a few quid's worth of donation into every project where you use it.

Ditch AIOSEO, it's crap. Use this instead.

Agree. WordPress SEO is far superior.
 
Rich

nope sorry, looks and smells like spam. Bye.

i think there is generally a certain amount of snobbery when it comes to how different web designers/developers etc code. Some will stress an awful lot about how they code everything themselves in notepad with no help from bright colors or plugins because they think it makes them sound like some sort of hero. I personally think that using any wysiwyg tool, be it dreamweaver or one of these online options is bad if you want to convincingly portray yourself as a webdesigner, coder or whatever.
 
However, using Dreamweaver for its coding featured is absolutely fine. As said, there are many great features in Dreamweaver for the code side. I have always used notepad++ its free and is a great code editor. But the other day i decided to try Dreamweaver, and now find myself using that for code. In the end its all about preference. If you have Dreamweaver installed then why not use it to code and take advantage of its features. But i personally would not pay £300 or whatever for it just to use as a code editor.
 
I also agree that it is vital to learn HTML and CSS. HTML is like a decease, it spreads through your brain and embeds itself there forever. With things like JavaScript, php etc its only really necessary to understand it. If you look at a piece of php and see only jumbled letter and rubbish, then you cannot sufficiently make non static websites. You have to be able to look at a piece of code and atleast understand to a certain point what its doing other wise as i said before, you are screwed if you want to look at things like joomla or wordpress in the future.
 
WELCOME TO THE FORUM

i think there is generally a certain amount of snobbery when it comes to how different web designers/developers etc code. Some will stress an awful lot about how they code everything themselves in notepad with no help from bright colors or plugins because they think it makes them sound like some sort of hero. I personally think that using any wysiwyg tool, be it dreamweaver or one of these online options is bad if you want to convincingly portray yourself as a webdesigner, coder or whatever.
 
However, using Dreamweaver for its coding featured is absolutely fine. As said, there are many great features in Dreamweaver for the code side. I have always used notepad++ its free and is a great code editor. But the other day i decided to try Dreamweaver, and now find myself using that for code. In the end its all about preference. If you have Dreamweaver installed then why not use it to code and take advantage of its features. But i personally would not pay £300 or whatever for it just to use as a code editor.
 
I also agree that it is vital to learn HTML and CSS. HTML is like a decease, it spreads through your brain and embeds itself there forever. With things like JavaScript, php etc its only really necessary to understand it. If you look at a piece of php and see only jumbled letter and rubbish, then you cannot sufficiently make non static websites. You have to be able to look at a piece of code and atleast understand to a certain point what its doing other wise as i said before, you are screwed if you want to look at things like joomla or wordpress in the future.
 
WELCOME TO THE FORUM

To be honest i'm very surprised that domain is available!
If it fits your business then snap it up now!

It doesn't look like you are actually joining the tables anywhere. Somewhere you need to have a key in one table equal to a key in another table to join the tables. Try (you will need to alter the WHere clause to select using the data you want.

SELECT teams.Team, country.Country, leagues.League FROM teams INNER JOIN country ON teams.country_ID = country.Country_ID INNER JOIN leagues ON leagues.League_ID=teams.League_ID WHERE teams.Country_ID=6 AND teams.League_ID=6

For £129 I could do a couple of hours consultation over the phone

I guess this guys also not to bothered about security either.

Well to be honest you can just smile to yourself, knowing that this guys business was a complete and utter failure the very second he thought of it

I would recommend doing some research first.... have a look at lots of different designs and layouts, you seem to be thinking along the lines of a rather standard boxed layout.
 
I have lots of helpful links if you drop me a pm I will send you some.

No problem
 
Have 2 x leaver arch files 1 for incoming and 1 for outgoing 12 polly pockets in each and put what you spend and what you make (invoices) in relevant folder and month pocket. Keep a record in excel as well

You don't have to pay tax until you earn over the limit which is around £7k these days I think. But you still need to register with HMRC and start paying your NI contributions. But yes, follow Panda's advice. You'll be surprised how easy it is.

if your earning 6k or less are you not going to start a pension either? Best pay something even if its only £2.50ish a week at class 2 you got some kind of contributions going in and will not be made to pay catch up if you later decided to go off and be employed later down the road. I could be wrong but I've always paid it.

not 100% you can pay 6 monthly though I think, give them a call I don't deal with that side of things my accountant does so I'm not up to date with latest trends, laws and changes to the HMRC system

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/MoneyTaxAndBenefits/Taxes/BeginnersGuideToTax/NationalInsurance/IntroductiontoNationalInsurance/DG_190048

Take a look at this video, and then watch the next 3 (4 short ones in total) Give it a go. It will teach the basic principles of how a template works with the Joomla content, it is so easy. Then you will be able to design any template to go with a joomla.
 
You must watch all for videos in full, don't be tempted to skip the bits that you might already know.
 

 
Hope it helps, it changed my life.

no most websites aren't build off of templates, you tend to start with a blank page and start coding or indeed dragging and dropping, unless you have made the template yourself. People, especially designers which use templates really annoy me as i cant see why they cant make the website from scratch them selves. The only time i would ever use a template would be if a client specified they had one or if i was asked to create an e-commerce site (as lets face it, who is mental enough to code one of those from scratch )
 
either way the site itself looks alright, but you can just smell template all over it so i would at least customize a few bits of the site to minimize this.

This is a good explanation about the different types of positioning and how they differ http://css-tricks.com/1191-absolute-relative-fixed-positioining-how-do-they-differ/
 
And a guide on good use of floats http://css-tricks.com/795-all-about-floats/

the website itself looks very good, nice and professional......But, i don't know if your really bothered, but the code has 30 errors in the w3c validator, so therefore isn't valid.
 
http://validator.w3.org/#validate_by_input