Tyssen

But, the second layout could have used more GIFs than JPGs. Took a while to download, even for me...

That's funny: the 1st one loaded way slower than the 2nd for me. Both are quite good, but the background image of Words makes the text too hard to read. I'd also personally have the headers a bit bigger especially if it's the major heading on the page. And you might want to consider using lists to present your links as it's a more semantically-correct way of doing so.

may be i haven't been not too clear, i would like to know how to add content of any kind but loosing the order.

Yeah, you're gonna have to try again cos I've got no clue what your actual problem is.

I think some people use adobe illustrator or the equivalent for things like this.

You wouldn't use Illustrator to do web layouts - Illustrator's a vector program which caters more for print design work. I use Photoshop & Fireworks to do my layouts - unfortunately, neither of those are free.

Mine came from a street near where I lived once.

I thought the cost of an upgrade was 30 credits? (Although I'd argue that it should only be 20 as I spent 10 going for the basic plan originally.) Well, my credits tell me that I've now only got 7.7 days left when I had nearly 60 when I applied for the upgrade.

being a gfx guru here

Why don't you big up yourself, mate?
One thing I'd say about the site is if you're going to have an order form, you really need to tell people what it is they're ordering.

I read Da Vinci Code. It was a good story, but his prose is definitely airport paperback style.

What is the robot meta tag all about?  Does anybody know?

It's only really needed on pages you don't want search engines to index (no index,no follow) cos the default (index,follow) is for them to index to your pages.

Depending on what FTP software you use, you can have the option to 'rename' rather than 'overwrite' which means the old file will get called filename_old.html so that if something does go wrong, it's still there for you revert back to.

I'd reckon you'd be better off putting that TOS stuff inside your site somewhere. I reckon a lot of people would be put off entering if they were greeted with that.

I've never used JS, but i'm sure they provide some functions to query a database

 

You can't query a database with javascript - it's all client side.

 

is this site loading only content based on the querystring and leaving all data which has loaded alone, or you mean it actually reloads the exact same page, and places the content where it belongs? Couse if so (not loading the page again), could you point out how you manage to do that (which i think you must have fixed with JavaScript)?

 

It is actually reloading the page each time you click on a link because the links all load up a different querystring. But I guess because the basic page layout isn't changing, it seems like the background never changes (well it seems like that for me - maybe people on slower connections will notice a reloading of the background).

 

The links look like this:

<ul id="links"><li id="news"><a href="?page=news" title="News"><span>news</span></a></li><li id="about"><a href="?page=about" title="About GRiT"><span>about</span></a></li></ul>

Then the main content area is like this:

<div id="text"><h1 id="<?echo$qString?>hd"><?echo$qString?></h1><?php include ("$path.inc"); ?></div>

I've used an if...else and a switch statement at the top of the page to work out what $path is based on the querystring. Each include then contains the HTML that is unique to each page. The links on the left are also generated the same way but they're a bit more complicated cos they're actually reading the directory and then printing the links based on which files it finds (and using the file names as the names for the links). This way the links are automatically generated each time you create a new include and the person who I did the site for doesn't have to worry about adding links into the HTML.

I used to have Coldfusion on my Windows XP box at home - the same one that I'm now running ASP & PHP under IIS - so I guess it can be done no problem.

Just find a site that's got something similar to what you're after and copy their code. Or some text-based HTML editors often have little wizards for automatically generating tables or form elements or lists etc. The one I use, AceHTML Freeware does.

Don't forget to go the the process link https://support.xisto.com/ to activate your upgraded hosting plan. Once the process has been completed you will see the correct information on your cPanel.

Oops. Obviously didn't read the email properly.

PHP is one thing and .NET is another - they can both do similar things but the language is going to be different. You're better off asking about a specific example of something and how it can be done in PHP.

There's a thread about some of the best ones here.

Well I usually work in ASP so not sure how it goes in PHP but a sub (sorry meant sub not function) in ASP works like this:

 

Sub WriteHeader(pageTitle,metaDescription)<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"  "http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ xmlns="http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/; xml:lang="en" lang="en"><head><title><% = pageTitle %></title><meta name="description" content="<% = metaDescription%>" /></head> <body>end sub

Then on your page, do this:

 

<% WriteHeader "Your page title","Your meta description" %>

The bit in the quote marks in the call to the sub gets input into the sub which prints that and the rest of the HTML.

You also need an include on each page that contains the sub.

I've had my upgrade application accepted by my cPanel still says my disk usage is XMb/20Mb. Is this correct or is it an error the way cPanel displays it?

I was going to say, if you have Dreamweaver, use find and replace. But if you don't...well, notepad has one, but you can't edit multiple files at once, so I don't know how else to help you...Sorry!

There are plenty of text-based HTML editors that do allow multiple file search and replace though. Get yourself one and it'll be done in a second.

so if you include for example a file named "meta.php" with all the meta tags defined in it (which i find myself cool) and then include it in each of your pages that need  that given set of meta tags, it should be visible by all the search engine spiders, as its normal html what is displayed.

I usually create a header include which includes the doctype, title, head section (including meta tags), header & top navigation and the left side navigation too if applicable. Whack that in a function which can then be called from all your pages to dynamically change things like meta description and <title> tag.
I do the same with my footer.
So then, most of my pages look like this:

Header include
Individual page content
Footer include

I certanly know that i can use <br /> to do so, i wanted independent <p>'s with different colors to be united without white space between them, not line breaks

<p class="red">text text text </p><p class="blue">text text text </p><p class="green">text text text </p>/* CSS */p.red, p.blue, p.green { margin: 0; padding: 0; }p.red { background: red; }p.blue { background: blue; }p.green { background: green; }

You might want to have some padding (other than 0) if you want some space around your text.

I think as people become more experienced with building websites they discover that Dreamweaver's not really the best tool for the job and start hand-coding all their sites, so for more experienced designers my guess would be that includes (whether it be PHP, ASP, SHTML or what) would be the favourite.

Fourth (and final question), how do I make a separate .css file, so that the page is calling that everytime? In the source code of a phpbb forum, there is this message:Well, how do I cut the final CSS code and place it in an external file.

I've not used phpBB but I would've thought you'd cut the code from the page, paste into your text editor and save it as *.css and then in your page put this:

<link rel="StyleSheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="*.css" />

G'day mate. I guess you're from up north then.

I lost my Photoshop disc, I'm going to install Fireworks instead, I bought a student addition a few years ago.  Hopefully it's pretty much the same...

Doesn't have nearly as many filters or quite the same selection capabilities as Photoshop but it's still my favourite for producing web graphics. It's not very good at producing print quality files though (ie it sux at making TIFFs) but then it's not designed for that.