Weedy101

A quick reality check. Most new to running a business think they have to save money on advertising, (SEO is a form of marketing tool), and don't see it as an investment in futures. Therefore many new businesses for the first 3 years will be looking only at what they spend. By the end of the 5th year of trading, assuming their business survives that long, the vast majority then start to think like a business and look at real factors such as ROI, and standards such as business budgeting methods and practices. According to European Community figures there are an estimated 3.5k legitimate business startups in Europe per day that are expected to succeed beyond their first year. This represents a vast number of small businesses seeking cheap solutions for their SEO on an annual basis which would twist the figures to look like many more actual businesses using the cheap options on a regular basis. Especially when you consider that the EU figures are for businesses that are expected to survive their first year and well over half of all startups will never see the first year out.

Looks like a nice guide to design theory, I will have to do some reading

Here is an article you may find interesting, How to create different shapes with css. It describes the basics well and gives food for thought. Have a read and experiment with the many examples, you may well come up with something new as well as find your own hexagon solutions.

I have not used foxy form, however I do use email-me. It is customisable, can be multi-page or multi-part, and you get the content sent to your own inbox laid out in the order you want it too, plus you get to reply directly to the customer and not go through the third party to reply. First 100 per month are free so it can save you money if you are still building traffic too

This is probably almost entirely a hacking issue. This post in another thread has a link to a site that can help you sort and prevent problems like this. http://www.webdesignerforum.co.uk/topic/77199-creating-a-website-for-a-hotel-using-wordrpress/?p=473818

You could do agency work instead of freelance. One reason why companies would want to hire from abroad is they want new influences, another is they may be hoping to hire for less money. Most will simply be looking at the individual and their personal abilities, what they can bring to the company ect and will hire the individual regardless of origins. Plus of course equal rights means you are equally entitled to get the job as the next applicant is, so they need to be able to offer more than you to win the race. **Edit** Don't forget that one of your strengths is your willingness to learn, and your readiness to relocate is another.

Being an amateur probably means my vote don't count but I use eclipse as it is available on Win, Mac, and Linux; plus it is capable of being used for so many different things, not just the web. All you do is install an add-on or create your own.

Personally I wouldn't touch an add like that with a barge pole - it is unlikely to pay you what you are worth! Working with others will always give you more opportunities to learn fast. You can still spend loads of time doing your home studies and personal projects too which then gives you the best of both worlds and you can apply what you learn at work to your own projects. This represents another chance to experiment and expand your knowledge, so win win! Plus an agency will most likely pay you on a regular basis, whereas working at home you WILL have lean times with NO pay!

All three of my businesses have a clearly advertised policy of spammers and cold callers will be black listed. It states that - It doesn't stop the first contact, but it does see existing suppliers that fall foul of it trying to apologise rapidly.

I use Solar accounts, It's quick and simple with automated repeat invoicing, bank account reconciliation, and automated payment reminders for your bills too. You can even create custom invoices. There is a free trial, and the full version is just £174 + vat. Very reasonable for such a useful piece of kit.

Your quotation page is not the same style as the main page, it would be better if this was consistent.

Unanimous so far - 3 for me too. The others seem to be either to busy, of topic, or both. 3 works well.

If you use the search bar at the top left of the forums with the keyword 'tutorials' you will find dozens of threads with links to many tutorials and reference material to work from as well. I find that experimenting with other peoples projects is a great way to learn, 2 sites I use for that are sitepoint and codrops, and another good point of reference is smashing magazine.

One way of checking this is just people not bothering to complete the process is by adding an 'unsubscribe' link to the email which will take them to a page that when they click the confirm button will automatically delete the incomplete account. Then set up a cron job that checks if people have completed the account setup process or not after 3 to 5 day's. If they haven't re-send the email. Then in your sites security settings force a message to be displayed to anybody that has not confirmed their email address and block access to some of you best features until they do. One important point is that if you don't enforce the registration process fully it is much harder to stop bots or hackers etc from registering in order to abuse your site.

If it cost's you £3.00 per day to sit at your pc designing and coding in electric but you only get paid £5.00 a week for that work you are better off going for a walk and giving £1.00 a day to a homeless guy! Why would you want to work for those silly rates, devaluing yourself and your work into negative equity?

If global businesses like Google are happy to announce they use shopify why do you want to hide it? If you use a lower end package, then tell you client that giants like Google trust it and they should trust in it, you site will have the quality reliable cart system your client wants and you can charge them more than £10.00 pcm for the basic package which as pointed out by others cost's around £8.30 pcm. This just adds to your profit margin and improves customers perception of your business - they will see you as choosing the best solution to suit their needs and look after their customers for them!

In the php folder you have the 'process.php' file, this is the one that is doing the work. <?php #recepient $recipient = 'test@test.com; #subject $subject = $_POST['subject']; #headers $headers = "From: Test <test@test.com>\r\n"; #message $message = "Name : {$_POST['name']}\n"; $message .= "Email : {$_POST['email']}\n"; $message .= "Subject : {$_POST['subject']}\n"; $message .= "Message : {$_POST['message']}\n"; if( mail($recipient, $subject, $message, $headers) ) echo "Mail Sent"; else echo "Mail Could Not Be Send"; As you can see the last line is an if statement, you should be getting either "Mails Sent" or "Mail Could Not Be Send" after you click the submit button. If you get "Mail Sent" then the problem is with your recipient email address - check the spelling etc, If you get "Mail Could Not Be Send" then the problem is that you have not configured your servers mail sending facilities to be compatible with mail() and may need to use sendmail or smpt. **EDIT** I just noticed that $recipient is missing the closing ' and thus the rest of the code is not being processed. Check you have corrected this before trying anything else.

My best advice here would be to pay a security specialist to create your own unique encryption algorithm so that you are not using any 'cobbled together' solution. Make sure that they are contracted to 'ensure the security of the data' and provide support, plus to 'write a unique algorithm and encryption/decryption scripts' that will not 'be re-used in part in whole for other works'.

Instead of trying to work out what a 'bot' will see on your page you need to be concerned with how a human will understand your content. Spurious keyword usage will only turn off potential buyers because they will see no value in the content. From an SEO point of view having the information that is relevant - Bot's don't know it is relevant themselves, but a user will - makes the image a valid item and not just decoration. Please don't make the big mistake of trying to talk to the bot's that are scanning your site, they don't spend money, talk to your visitor's. Engage them with quality content and you will tend to naturally improve the SEO of your site. Especially if you optimize accessibility for screen readers, and 'low end devices' while keeping the site interesting and CURRENT.

Er, well. Top left - the MW crash and why those colours; Top right - the MW don't work together, who is she? Are we supposed to want a body like that, if so can I have a red head please; Bottom left - AW or is it MV?; Bottom right - I'm sure I sore captain scarlet of the misterons sneak through there. The letters appear to be creating some sort of symbolic image from a 60's tv show, why?

With learning all things web I spend a lot of time looking for code examples that I can strip back, open source projects and in particular framework projects are great for that. I don't normally do more than some basic experiments with any framework to make sure I have figured out which pieces are doing what properly. It doesn't take much time to dump a framework once you have finished going through the pieces you want to learn from, and when they are free the only cost is my own time. Plus there is the added bonus that open source projects usually have very useful forums that describe the sections of the project very clearly too. For MySqli try the Yii framework it really does have quite a comprehensive set of commands and statements to work from that can be directly compared with other formats that you already know

Here's a link to 2-plan-team, I use this one to oversee what all three of my businesses are upto in one place and can directly manipulate projects or even get clients directly involved too. This is an open source project, but it is worth a generous donation!

One thing I have found very useful is stripping back frameworks and studying their prepared statements. It can be a bit of work to find exactly where they are but most frameworks have several different types of queries for the different DB's out there which means you get to compare how it is being done with other formats that you already know

When developing your content try doing a little research by reading magazine and news paper columns. Columnists often use a large number of quotes but discuss the actual quote, learning from them may help as you will find that news papers and magazines don't suffer when it comes to SEO for their articles.

There might be some potential there is only it was legible. What is it supposed to say or be?