Daniel Hegarty

NotePad++ is where it is at!

i would say have a look at the paypal sandbox environment. it will allow you to test the shopping cart transaction also look up IPN, which is generally the system of completing the transaction when payment has been received.

i think the people on the right look weird. I wouldn’t use humans on a website unless there is something unique about them. From my experience these days’ people have more interest in individuality, rather than putting someone’s mug in a suit on the page. The moving text is good! That is popular at the moment. Make sure you comment in your documentation and code where to change the text for these slogans.

Get rid of that guy, he is on the web more then spiderman! But really, I have seen that guy in templates from years ago. it could do with something moving on there like a news reel or a drop-down menu, maybe you could use the Our services for a reel or something. It’s not very expandable, the guys head is in the way of adding anymore headings. Templates are a tough market as there are so many good ones out there for $60, I think you might struggle to sell it without anything special. But keep trying and you will come up with something new that someone will want.

I like it. But i have to agree with spitfire, businesses generally want to see something colourful and eye catching. When a prospective customer looks at your site they automatically think about how theirs will turn out and grey i think may put them off. However, if they have a peek at your portfolio I’m sure they will be sold Maybe try doing something with the background and changing the horizontal title ribbons to a better colour then black. Maybe match with background. Just my opinion obviously

I think you should work a bit more on the design of that page. There are a lot of things in your mock-up that would not work well in good CSS, and you will find it will look better if those rules are applied. If your CSS is laid out well you will be able to try out different colour styles as you go. Also depending on what program you used to draw the image you will be able to play around even easier. But for example, your search box in the top right corner will not look anything like that when implemented, unless you REALLY want it to.There are much nicer form elements that you can easily style in CSS. Once you have worked your way through these tweaks you will find your design looking a lot better.

For a beginner to the world of Web development I always suggest starting off small and then adding to it. So, decide what you want the site to do, take away the difficult bits and then build what you know you can do. If that may only be drawing a design at this point then do that! Then learn how to make it into html and so on. Step by step. Any half decent developer will be able to take what you have done and turn it into something that works, so if at some point you decide that you need to pay someone to add something, you can ask them to just do that and nothing else, keeping your costs down. A drawback to not hiring a professional is that your site may miss out on the simple yet important techniques that you wouldn’t know about unless you were quite well studied. It doesn’t hurt to try things yourself but ultimately if you need a stable professional website… there is a reason that people pay us to do it for them.

Sorry but i can’t help but notice that notice that no one has really offered an answer to the forum newcomers questions, well with the exception of the .org.uk thing. Ok so firstly the fact that you want to use Word Press has nothing to do with the domain name. You can have anything imaginable and as long as your hosting company provides PHP and MySQL database hosting then you are good to go. On the domain name issue, if it is already taken then you could email the owner and ask them if they are willing to sell it you but it is normally more viable to just go for a different variation. You can normally find the owner by going to who.is and typing in the domain that you are after. Now that is out of the way, you don’t have to use the same company for the domain that you do the hosting. The only reason that you might want to do this is for convenience. You will be able to pay one fee be it per month or year for both services and it may automatically link the hosting to the domain which would save you configuration. If you decide to get your domain name from a different company to the hosting that is perfectible acceptable and all you have to do is provide the domain name company / control panel with the name servers. This is an address that instructs the DNS to link to the hosting server when that domain is typed in. sound complicated? ... it really isn’t. Most hosting and domain reg companies will provide help or documentation on how to do this. Or you can ring me! I provide a managed hosting service for £75 per year with a domain name of your choice. You tell me what you want and I’ll get it all working for you.

good to know is this on a transaction dependant system too? thanks Dan

Hi all Just wanted your Guys opinion. I am working on a project that i similar to a digital download system using PayPal for payment. The system uses the Instant Payment notification for verify that the payment has been successful before emailing the customer their goods. It works perfectly with a DB backend being updates by the IPN listener page also. However PayPal say that you should not use IPN as a transaction dependant system and not delay the transaction waiting for the IPN message. Have any of you peeps, had to make a similar system and what did you use. Also what is your experience of IPN delays? Does it happen often enough to worry about? Thanks Daniel

sorry the title is supposed to be "Can't pass though a Variable" Hi all i have tried every which way to get this variable to another page but it just gets wiped. i am using the FreeASPUpload script and i can get it to send the files to the server. i have figured how to get the file name for each file so that they can be added to the db. But every time i click upload my request.querystring gets lost and when i store it in a session variable it gets wiped as well. Anyone have the same issue? I will offer a PayPal bonus to anyone that comes up with a working solution. Dan

Has anyone ever heard of these guys? they give you money for clicking ads. Dan

I remember a day when you could put a banner on your website and you would receive 1p by a user simply clicking the advert. Now it would seem that they only payout when that user then downloads or purchases something. do pure PPC still exist and if so which ones do you use? Daniel

Hi mate. i would fade out the reflections on the portfolio a bit more as it is not obvious at first that some of them are reflections. Dan

wow man i was turning on and off the lights for ages. excellent work. i hope you charged a lot for your first class creativity! Dan

oh by the way. an open source cms like joomla would be like using a sledge hammer to crack a nut and thought it would be better to build my own for customisation reasons.

Thanks Guys, some interesting stuff to think about. very helpful point about the project specification and i have just finished making that has my t&c on it too. this i suppose stops people taking the mik. thanks again. its been really helpful. Dan

thanks peeps.

Does any know of any free windows hosting control panels that allows the users to set up email accounts and the like from a web interface. like pleask but for free? Dan

Nice, really creative ideas there. the tree would be ok if it lined up with the right side border, or that could just be my screen. also never drive traffic away from your website by offering links to other website even if you created them (like in your portfolio) have each of the links open in a new window. that way the user will stay on your site for longer.

this is what i mean, he is used to me taking care of the lot for him and if i said £800 he would faint. lol i have done so many shops before, i have a lot of code already so i don't think it would take that long, round ten hours i think. and it is'nt going to have a transaction system yet, just a reserve and collect maybe.

i think you and so this if they are stored in an array.

Hi boys and girls -Removed by Topic Starter- Thanks Daniel

The easiest we isnt really the best way (using tables). You will have to use a an inner loop that will count three items and the loop if you want to try and do it with divs.

try playing around with the min widths in css, if you get no better result then make the top banner an image. this will then stop the page shrinking an smaller then the width of the image. bit of a cowboy way of doing things but it works. Dan