[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

something like paypal is your best bet. if you are going to program your own store, you’ll get in way over your head rather quickly (i.e. it’s not a simple thing at all)…

if you have a small store, something like the aforementioned paypal would be perfect – you can set up your store there through their web-based interface, and they offer a ton of support. other options include kagi (https://www.kagi.com/) or yahoo’s stores (https://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/merchant/) – none of these require any programming knowledge to set up and use…

hope that helps!

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

that certainly works great – the only caveat might be when you have plain text content in a box because you might not be able to guarantee the height, meaning you couldn’t reliably do the division to get it perfectly vertically centered…

but outside of that, this is a very cool way to do centering – i’ve always done it the old table way, but this is much easier…

hope that helps!

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

you can use just about any scripting language for this – here’s a php example:

https://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.header.php

(scroll down a little ways)

basically what you are doing in any of the languages is making a page and setting the content type header to your type of file (or just plain binary if you want to ensure the browser won’t open it automatically)…then you are streaming the file under that content type and the browser takes that and says to the user “what do you want to do with this?”…

then this just becomes a scripted page and you just link to that like a normal page and you’ll get the desired result. this is about the only way you can do it, but again, you can do it in just about any web scripting language (php, perl, asp, jsp, etc.)…

hope that helps!

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

i will totally agree that css is a great way to go to control site design, although i would offer a few things based on your notes:

[isotrope] “They’re cross-broswer/cross-platform safe. They don’t go weird when viewed in finicky browsers like tables do. “

while css is indeed certainly cross-browser, it will act differently between ie and firefox and between windows and mac. this is due to different interpretations of the w3 spec, and ie/win tends to be much more forgiving about things like padding, margin, etc. on elements. but there are easy workarounds…the only thing to make sure is to check your site carefully in as many browsers and platforms that you have access to. this will help ensure that they all look as you’d like them to…

[isotrope] “They allow absolute positioning, almost as specific as layers in Photoshop”

on a general level, i really recommend against using absolute positioning – it’s very tempting as you have seemingly endless control, but the more you lock down now, the harder it becomes later to change the site and make updates. i recently helped out a friend with a site where the original developer had absolutely positioned _everything_ on the site, from the top nav and logo to the bottom menus. this was all well and good, but i needed to add a bit of copy to the pages and a nav item. what would have been a few hours in a non-absolute environment turned into a 1+ day struggle to figure out the code and also adjust all the layer pixel placements to fit the new layout.

there is no layout that would seemingly benefit from absolute positioning that cannot be done even with old-fashioned tables. there is an old (very old) trick of making a 1×1 pixel transparent gif and stretching it to a size that will force and hold neighbor elements in place in any browser, yet still let the site grow and change over time. i still frequently make use of that transparent pixel gif, and it does wonders compared to absolute positioning.

[isotrope] ” Or they can be used in a very scalable way (with percentages).”

this is a _great_ thing to bring up – using font sizes with percentage values as opposed to pixel values is something that i’ve recently started forcing myself to do. as a designer, it is hard because you do give up some control, but it really is extremely user-friendly and a usability plus. this is because if you say a font should be 12 pixels, it will be 12 pixels no matter what, whereas if you say a font should be 90%, it will be 90% of whatever they currently have their fonts at in their browser. however, it will ensure that the user can see your content and read it and be able to use your site, and isn’t that the goal after all?

just my $.02 worth… 🙂

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello!

i hope this still gets read – was on vacation for a few days there… 🙂

i am personally a hand-coder, so what i do is start with a blank canvas in ps – usually about 900×700 or so to replicate a “typical” browser window (assuming 1024×768 res). then a few guides to 800×600 and i just dive in with an idea. usually that comes from a design i’ve seen somewhere (https://coolhomepages.com or https://cwd.dk are great places) and i start my own piece. it all stays in photoshop the entire time until i get a template that i think is good enough, and then i’ll take parts and put it into html. what i might do is turn off all the content areas and save it as a huge jpg and then make that the bg of the page for mockup. then build a few simple tables to place content in that and i have something to show a client…

after that, i’ll break it all out into more bits (at that stage, i might use image maps for nav before making each item) and do other large chunks to make it easier. then if everybody likes it, it gets fully broken out into the final site…

but that’s just me…but i find it’s immensely easier to play in photoshop with a canvas because i can move images around and adjust stuff to my heart’s content without needing to worry about html or previewing, etc…

hope that helps! feel free to fire back anything that comes to mind…

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

ah! ok – i gotcha. ya – that’s a great way to start, and most importantly you should do what makes you comfortable. if you work well that way then by all means do it… 🙂

(i do prefer the window in photoshop to start with – i have all the tools i need and i typically end up with 40+ layers of ideas that turn into a template that then goes out to the web page when i’m happy with it)

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

this is a very broad issue, so it’s sort of hard to give you a good path to start down – your psd/dreamweaver way is still extremely common, so i think you’ll be fine that way…

i tend to just use photoshop for most of my initial process and then make templates from that – it is a nice way to do design, imho. start with a 800×600 photoshop document and let the ideas fly!

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

that’s a very broad question, unfortunately…my sort of off-the-cuff answer is that if you want to advise others about seo then you need to read everything you can get your hands on so that you can answer any question. if you want to just make your site more optimized, then get a book like this and read up and put in place what he suggests…

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

this book should be your primary resource:

https://www.seobook.com/

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

check the prefs for the individual app – mail has the ability to add custom sounds there…

sitruc