deanp

Some excellent plugins here too. especially like the look of Flutter. i'll probably be incorporating that into my next design! clicky clicky

Hi Guys, Designing the site for my snooker club, which also happens to be one of the most active and famous clubs in the south in terms of competitions, juniors and news, so i really want to get this right. Here's the layout i've been working on. Please don't worry about the Calendar or the club logo in this version. The logo hasn't been received from the client yet, but will be placed in the top left corner using a similar theme to the images at the bottom. And the Calendar will be updated when coded. Thanks for your opinions. Dean

i realise that, and for pricing research that's part of what i'm doing. but phoning around companies and asking general opinions isn't going to get me information on how many sites i should expect to be able to sell in the first 3 months, or how many new companies in my area in the last 2 years have needed new sites, or revamping / improvements on an old one, and how i can expect this market to grow in the coming years, especially with a global recession going on. i can't really get out a phone book and phone around design companies in my area and ask, "so how many sites have you sold in the last 4 months and whats been your total gross income and profit margin for the last year?" This is the sort of information i need to try and find so i can make educated decisions on what to expect and plan for with my new business. finances need planning to make this work well!

so as i said in a previous post, i'm planning to start up my own small company. i'm in the process of writing up my business plan and am trying to gather some market research. have any of you guys done this and what resources have you used? i've looked into market research sites, but can only seem to find companies that want to charge me thousands for the information. surely there has to be some form publically available database with some of these stats on there? just trying to find and figure out average costings, income/revenue, average hourly rates, and maybe some growth charts so i can put a realistic figure to my expectations. have any of you guys ever tried searching for this kind of information and not had to pay through the teeth for it? Dean

OK, so i've been a freelancer for a little while, however me and a good friend of mine have put our minds together and decided to do business together and start our own small company. question 1: For uncertainty of the future purposes, is it better to set up as 2 sole traders cooperating under the same company name, giving us the freedom to work together and progress the company, but if things aren't what we thought they would be still be able to make individual decisions. OR set up as a partnership and split everything down the middle, split decisions and all. thing is, every single person i've ever heard of that has started a partnership at some point has come to a disastrous end or simply not worked the way they thought it would. question 2: as a commercial business to design are there any specific licenses needed in order to commercially create and sell websites? e.g: specific commercial license for photoshop commercial license to sell art work etc Thanks for any input guys Dean

there is a quicker way for it than using a form and hidden field to process. create 2 css classes, one with styles set for non-JS page view and one for JS active page view. in the written code put in the classes for the non-JS view, then add a very small function that runs on page load in javascript to replace the non-JS class with the JS active class for the divs that need it. and voila! if the page has JS enabled, the classes for JS are written into the code and view correctly, and if JS is disabled the classes are never replaced and the default code is parsed and viewed. code is as follows CSS: .js-disabled {overflow:auto;} .js-enabled {overflow:hidden;} Javascript $(document).ready(function(){ //For people with javascript disabled -----> $('#large-view, #small-slider, #description').removeClass('js-disabled').addClass('js-enabled'); //-----------------------------------------> }); HTML <div id="description" class="right tint js-disabled"> this example uses the jQuery functions because i've already imported the package for use with other things. Just import jQuery if you havn't already or use the equivalent of addClass and removeClass for whatever package you're using. then replace the ID names (#large-view) with whatever div id's you need to and you're set! hope it helps Dean

OUT WITH IE6! VIVA LA RESISTANCE!!

indeed, looks all good to me in ""IE7""

i know NHS is indeed a perfect example. i'm working for them at the moment helping to update a massive influx of content for certain departments, and let me tell you; those machines in that office are some of the worst i have ever used! this is mainly the reason for me trying to get an uprising (more a bit of fun really with a small universally shared rant). to be honest i would be glad to update every one of those machines in my office for free if it meant my life would be slightly more stress free for the next 2 weeks . Stupid corporate tightwads besides, people in those offices should be working and not trying to look at our beautifully designed sites, mutilating them with IE6, so it wouldn't make a difference if we ousted IE6

With the new release of IE8, Safari 4 and Firefox 3 SURELY TO GOD by now it's time developers the world over got together and made a stand to phase out the pile of steaming excrement that is IE6? How much longer do we really have to put up with trying to work around the bane of all designers existence? i think it's about time a stand is made, and i can't think of a better place for it; who's with me?!!!

you don't even need to post your findings, a link to your site, or even the link from the validator site after assessing your site will do.

not so sure about charges for fixing validation problems, but to be honest alot of validation errors can be overcome easily by looking at what they tell you. the validator will give you a line number for the error, then a reason why it failed. things like an ID being defined more than once on a page is a common one. maybe if you posted us a link to your site we could help you validate it yourself instead of paying for this service?

hey there, firstly, don't worry so much! the whole reason this forum is here is to ask questions! we're all friendly here and there's no such thing as a silly question. personally when i first set about designing a site i take a look at what the site is going to be used for. is it a business? is it a showcase? is it a blog? is it a sports club? once you have this in mind you can then go about thinking what audience you will be targeting. other businesses? customers? kids? age groups? then you can think about what content should be roughly included in the site. not necessarily the words, but the topics. and how much emphasis should be shown to these topics. once all this is planned out and thought about, you can then start thinking about how you would like people to see this content. do you want one page dedicated to each topic? do you want different sections on a page for similar topics? how much space should you give to each section of the page? thinking this way gives you blocks to work with, chunks of content to move around and play with. when you've got a good idea of how you want people to read this content, you can then think about how to encase it within a design. put borders around it etc. this is the best way to get a new design into sizable chunks. as for photoshop, it's all personal preference. some people like to design entirely in photoshop, chop it up and code away. but if you don't follow the first steps i wrote above, even the best people come stuck in places sometimes. (i know i've learnt the hard way!) but again, even doing this, in order to chop up a psd, you need to know what blocks to chop it up into, which will ultimately be defined by your content arrangement. hope this helps Dean

All of this still depends on the HTML as bocaj has already spotted. it's all well and good having the correct CSS, but it still won't show if the HTML is wrong. Show us the HTML you're trying to use with it and we'll be able to tell you exactly where things are going wrong.

another option is to check with your web host. i'm with heartinternet, and for the package i have they offer alot of free software to be used with your websites that can be installed to your server, some of which include shopping cart solutions. another solution i would also recommend is looking into Shopify. it's inexspensive and completely customizable for bespoke designs. theres also a good tutorial i came accross recently for designing for shopify here