Gordon MWS

I would suggest one of two options... 1. Spend some more time with your friend Google - there are literally thousands of tutorials out there that will get you up and running... 2. Save yourself the hassle and use a CMS that supports user accounts. (much quicker and more secure!)

I'm glad you took it that way! Colours really are down to what you feel suits the site and it's audience best. If you are struggling to come up with a colour scheme I would recommend you have a dig through ColourLovers. You can put your background colour in and see what colour schemes other people have come up with - really handy site. I would take heed of the comments above also, I too am not a fan of 'best viewed in' comments. To be honest if you aim for strict validation and clean CSS there is no real reason to stipulate a best browser. However you don't want to get me started on the 'should we drop support for IE6' argument as you'll never shut me up! Take it easy...

I would recommend gaining a better understanding of (X)HTML as a good starting point. Dreamweaver is a fantastic product but it is not human and sometimes produces 'surprising' results should we say! I too use DW but very rarely use the design view, I learnt the code side of life first and stuck with it. W3Schools have a tutorial here which would be a good starting point. Once you get your head around XHTML you have a better idea what DW does to achieve meaning you can fault find the code yourself. It doesn't take long to pick up either, it's quite straight forward. If I can help at all feel free to PM me and I will dig out some links to other good learning sites.

I would agree that it could do with a bit more colour, just to give the page a bit more impact. Another thing I noticed is that you seem to have a lot of id and classes that are not really required. If the site is to promote the use of CSS over tables all the power to you - but the beauty of CSS is in the fact that you can keep your code really clean and semantic. (Not being negative here I hope you understand, just trying to help!) I will pick a couple of examples to show what I mean... On the homepage you have the following: <div id="news"> <h2 id="date_text">8th March 2009</h2> Setting your font size to 16. To make this more semantic and to reduce the code you would be better using: <div id="news"> <h2>8th March 2009</h2> and in your stylesheet put: #news h2 {font-size:16px;} On your templates page you seem to be attaching an id on to each heading tag? For a start there should only be one element on the page with an ID, for multiple elements you should use a class - but again there is no need... Instead of: <div class="addcontent"> <h2 id="h2">Simple Box Centered Template</h2> To set the font-size to 16px, you would be better... <div class="addcontent"> <h2>Simple Box Centred Template</h2> within your stylesheet: .addcontent h2 {font-size:16px;} Or if your whole site sets 16px as a standard for h2 tags, just put: h2 {font-size:16px;} ...in the stylesheet and be done with it. The only reason I point this out is that if people are going to come to your site for CSS templates they will probably have a reasonable understanding of this kind of stuff already and you want get a good reputation from the start. I honestly wish you the best of luck with the site as it is more promotion for ditching tables, but you need to clean up your own CSS out before passing any on to others. If I can offer any advice or help in anyway feel free to PM and I will help where I can.

The error doesn't really give much away without seeing what is in the ifwdform.php. Just out of curiosity why have you opted to use a flash based form? You could easily code that up in DW as HTML and send it to a very simple PHP script with a new header call directing you to a confirmation page. Honestly start to finish it would take less than an hour (including a simple captcha funtion) and you would know where to look should there be any errors! I am a fan of Flash in the right place, but forms are native to HTML and in my 'grumpy old man' opinion work best from there.

My first thought would be that you must have created a connection to the database already in order to pull that content out of a table, so why does your data have another connection in it?? That aside I have never tried pulling PHP from a database I tend to keep all my code in it's own files/arrays. It could either be something simple like an escaped character problem (are you using addslashes and stripslashes to store and retreive?), but I would have thought that is more likely a parsing problem. PHP will dump the data retreived into a variable and display it, it will then move on so the code you've pulled will never actually be read as PHP code - I could be wrong but that is what I would imagine without doing a bit more digging. The HTML parts will display as they are native to the DOM and hence dealt with on the client side. I would recommend using an established CMS for your site anyway. I too went through a 'I'm going to build my own' phase and soon realised that the development and testing time followed by security implementation was killing my time to re-invent the wheel! There are loads out there to choose from that are open source GPL so you can hack away quite happily to tailor it to your needs, but you will be up and running with a working (and secure!) site much quicker. Many of these also have built in support for 'pretty-urls' (answering your other post) as standard using either PHP or .htaccess depending on the CMS, so you could easily redirect your existing static domains without any loss of rank. I have been getting stuck into CMS Made Simple over the last week or so and have found it to be one of the most flexible and customisable of the half dozen or so that I have tried to date. Failing that if you are going to code your own, you should maybe look at using a framework such as CodeIgniter. Lots of built in libraries means quicker development and simplified structure with great support for the security side of things. (plus someone else has done most of the hard work for you! - nice ) I hope this helps, in some way!?

Failing that it is easy enough to do with a little bit of JQuery or whatever your JavaScript flavour is.

You appear to be where I was a week ago! I have put off learning JavaScript for years, but whilst trying to find a script to match my needs I finally bit the bullet and decided to have a look at JQuery... ...I will never look back! It depends on the requirements you have i.e. how big the table will be, how many rows etc. I am sure if you have a few hours available to flick through the online docs for JQuery you would be able to work something out. To be honest the fact that it must be in a table is a real drawback! Does it really have to be a table?

Most of these kind of problems can be cured by using a reset stylesheet before your own. It eliminates a lot of the differences in display between browsers.

Not strictly true if you use the full version margin: 0 auto 0 auto; IE picks it up fine, from what I can tell...

Depends on your work email setup. If you are running on exchange it might be getting filtered as spam on arrival and never making it to your inbox.

Very nice design, reminds me a lot of one of my favourite blogs - Abduzeedo

Your not far away on most, although tables should only ever be used to display tabular data - css styled lists will do navbars and menus. It is generally frowned upon to use tables for layout these days, and to be honest once you get your head around css it is much more flexible than any table could ever be!

Have you tried WebCalendar, I was recommended it by a friend of mine. Let me know what you make of it as I haven't had a chance to look at it in any detail or try it out myself yet...

No need mate, just glad I could help out - thanks for the offer though! Gordon

I use xampp and swear by it - easy install and stable... Hope this helps!

Yeah I'll second the banner comment above. The other thing I noticed (in FF) is half the navigation is hiding behind the 'quick job search' the rollovers still work but you can't read the text.

Like it, nice to see a colour slider put to effective use - it doesn't detract from the rest of the design at all, well done!

404 Not Found for me as well...

It's neat and tidy, if not a little small by current standards. One question though, why have you used a table for your links? CSS would take care of that just as easy... I'm guessing the lack of meta etc, and the copyrighted images are as you are still in the design phase?

Have you got a link so we can see what is actually happening? Sounds like it could be a padding issue depending on what CSS you have in play - hard to say without seeing it though.

Have you taken your link down?

Does that not make validation of username a bit harder?

I would have thought something like this would work, although it would need some sort of verification that the username exists in whatever system you are trying to tie this in with - that bits up to you! Your form would be... <form action="create-url.php" method="post"> <input type="text" name="username" /> <input type="submit" name="submit" value="submit" /> </form> Then the 'create-url.php' file would be something like... <?php if (!$_POST['username']) { header("Location:http://www.wherever-you-want-to-send-it-if-no-username-entered.com"); } else { header("Location:http://www.the-url-prefix-you-want-goes-here.com/".$_POST['username']); } ?> Not tested and needs a bit of polish, but it should hopefully be a starting point if nothing else! Regards, Gordon

Here is how I do it, if it helps at all... <?php // Test to see if the form has been submitted... if (!$_POST['submit']){ ?> <!-- This bit is if the form has NOT been submitted... --> <form action="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];?>" method="post"> <!-- put your form in here making sure your submit button is named 'submit' --> </form> <?php } else { // Error list initialise $errorlist = array(); // Required input tests if (!isset($_POST['name']) || trim($_POST['name'])=="") { $errorlist[] = "You must enter your name."; } // Email address verification if(!eregi("^[[:alnum:]][a-z0-9_.-]*@[a-z0-9.-]+\.[a-z]{2,4}$", $_POST['email'])) { $errorlist[] = "Incorrect email address format"; } // If you opt use a CAPTCHA system it would do the check here // Check for validation errors + redisplay form for corrections if (sizeof($errorlist)>0){ echo "<p>"; foreach ($errorlist as $e) { echo "<span class='errormessage'>$e </span><br />\n"; } echo "</p>"; ?> <!-- Redisplay the form here - I enter the form as before but use <?php echo $_POST['fieldname'];?> to repopulate the entered fields with what the user entered. --> <?php } else { // All information valid and complete - processing action... $to = 'email@yourdomain.com'; $subject = 'Web Contact Form'; $message = 'Name, The following information was submitted through the website contact form... Sender : ' . $_POST['name'] . ' Subject : ' . $_POST['subject'] . ' Email : ' . $_POST['email'] . ' Message: ' . $_POST['message'] . ' -------------------------------------------------------------- To respond directly to the sender, simply reply to this email.'; mail($to, $subject, $message, "From: ".$_POST['name']."<".$_POST['email'].">"); echo "<p>Your message has now been sent, we will respond shortly.</p>"; } } ?> You will have to enter the field names that match your form for the mail bit to send, but hopefully you will be able to grab enough out of this to get up and running (and it provides a bit of validation too!) I would also recommend using Captcha, save getting dodgy 'bot' generated emails from your form page. Take it easy, Gordon