Web Design For Idiots » How-To

Fixed Width Centered Website

Lindsayanng — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 05:54:52 +0000

Want to take your entire website and make it a fixed with and have it centered in the middle of everyone’s screen? Well, you should. The great thing about having a fixed width and centered site is that it will look exactly the same on everyone’s computer monitor. It’s a great thing, because fluid websites that take up the entire width of a screen can look great on your monitor, and then you go look at it on a lower resolution monitor, and all of a suddent you have to scroll sideways to see all of it.

So this is going to be one of the EASIEST things that I will teach you, and it will change the look of your website GREATLY. This works on ALL TYPES of websites. Blogs, oscommerce, basic HTML. It does not matter.

do this..
AT THE VERY BEGINING of your HTML code, after the tag, add this:

YOUR WEBSITE CONTENT WILL ALL

BE BETWEEN THESE TWO THINGS.

EVERY SINGLE BIT OF IT – EXCEPT

OF COARSE THE STUFF IN THE HEAD

How to use Fetch FTP

Lindsayanng — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 07:31:02 +0000

I recently wrote a tutorial on how to use FileZilla. The reason I wrote that tutorial first was because MOST people have FIleZilla, and the reason why is because it is free. However, if you have an Apple computer, you will be so much better off and you will save yourself so many headaches if you download and install Fetch FTP from HERE.
The reason I suggest Fetch is because it is plain and simple. Thats it. If you just look at the FileZilla tutorial, you will see how long and drawn out it is. When you read through this, if you haven’t already installed Fetch, you will want to.

Step 1 – connect:

When you click on the Fetch icon after installing it, it will automatically bring you to the connection window. It looks like this:

The graphic is pretty self explanatory, however I will go into detail a little bit more for you “nuts and bolts” type of people.

HOSTNAME: This will be the domain name in which you will be FTPing your content to. So if you have a hosting account with hostmonster, and you have a domain name with hostmonster called mydomain.com then your hostname will be mydomain.com. If you are just an additional user to someone else’s domain, you will just use their domain name that they gave you.

USERNAME/PASSWORD: If you own the hosting account, then this usually is created for you by your host when you actually create the account. It is easy enough to find it if you don’t know where it is. You will just go to your control panel and look for a link that says FTP Accounts and click on there. There you will see a list of all of the accounts for your domain name and you can also add new ones. If you are just a secondary user to someone else’s website, they will supply the username and password for you.

INITIAL FOLDER: This is the folder that you want to land on when you connect. If you don’t have a website at the domain name yet, then you will simple put ” public_html ” which is just the main directory for your website. If you know that you are going to be uploading images to a folder that already exists. For instance, you created a sub folder called “cats” in a folder called “pets” You will put /pets/cats/ as the directory that you would like to land on. If you are a secondary user for this account, and you are given your own folder to use to store content, you will enter your folder’s name like this /yourfoldername/

PORT: This is usually something that you do not have to concern yourself with. When connecting there rarely is an instance where an FTP program will not connect if you leave your port blank. However, when you create new users for FTP login, it gives them a port number, so you can always enter the port number but if you do not know it, you can also leave it blank.

TRY TO CONNECT _ TIMES: You should connect on the first try, otherwise you will set this to a nmber of times to continue to attempt to your host if it does not connect on the first try. I always leave this blank as well, as I know I will connect on the first try.

SHORT CUTS: You can see two little graphics next to the hostname option. They allow you to create short cuts so that every time you connect, you do not have to put in the same information over and over. You can set it to just remember the info and leave the password blank, or to remember the password as well.

Step Two – inside the domain:

Once you are inside, you will see a bunch of folders and files. Make sure that you are in the ” public_html ” folder. Any content stored outside of that folder will not be viewable to the public. If you can see the ” public_html ” folder in the list of folders, double click on it to open it and be in that folder. If you are a secondary FTP user, you will likely only be able to access certain folders and this will never be an issue for you.

The great thing about Fetch FTP, like I mentioned eariler, is that it is super duper easy. When you look at the tool bar, it is likely that you will know what to do right off the bat. But just in case, I created another little graphic for you here:

Many of those items in the top navigation bar are extremely self explanitory, so I will only explain the more complicated ones.

GET: Getting a file is very simple. If there is a file on the remote server that you can see in the file list inside of fetch that you would like to download to your computer, you simply click on the file name and click the get button. This will automatically download the file. SIMPLE

PUT: Putting a file is also simple. This is used if you have files on your computer that you want to upload to the website. When you click on put you will see a normal file browser. You will simple browse to the file you would like to put and click OK in the browser. When it is complete you will be able to see the file name in the list of files inside of the folder that you are currently in. If you want to put a file in a different folder, simple double click to open that folder, you use the back button to get to a previous directory and double click to open that folder and then click put. When you put a file on the server, you have to already be in the folder that you want the file to be in.

INFO: Is a very valuable tool for web devlopers. By clicking on a file and the clicking on info, you will see a bunch of valuable information. In there you will see the file path, size, the permissions set, and the date modified. Here you can also rename the file if you would like.

And thats it. You officially know everything you have to about using Fetch FTP for getting a website or content onto a server. Now again, compare these instructions with THESE and tell me this wasn’t super easy!

Just another note. If you want to move files from one folder to another, it is as simple as dragging and dropping. The great thing about this is it works just like your file browser on your computer, so everyone who uses a computer should be VERY comfortable with it!

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Starting from scratch -table layouts

Lindsayanng — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 07:15:07 +0000

So you decided that you want to start COMPLETELY from scratch and build your website/blog without the help of ANYONE.

GOOD FOR YOU!

But i bet you have no idea where to start.

The easiest, most newbie way, is to start by using one large TABLE to hold your main content.

A table is an element of a website that allows you to organize your data into rows and columns. Much like you do when you are creating a microsoft word document that has a table.

This will be one of the easiest things you learn, but probably one of those things that you use EVERYWHERE. If i can teach this concept to my husband in a few hours, surely you guys can get it.

So let’s start explaining how a table works.

You are always going to start your table with this:

and end it with this

So just using those two pieces, you have a table with NO rows and NO columns, so you can not start putting info in there yet. You need to have ATLEAST one row and one column in a table.
A row for a table is defined by this:
– simple right? tr means
Table Row.

You close off, or end that row with this:

Are you getting the gist now?? You always start with the tag, and end it with the tag PLUS ‘/’

Now, your needs to have one more thing inside of it which is

I don’t know if this is the CORRECT definition of , but it helped me to remember it as
Table Data.
This is the tag that will hold ALL of the content for the row that it is contained in.

So for a recap

If you take all of those steps and combine them together you get the following:

This give you a table that looks like this: (see that TINY little box beneath this?

The reason it is so small is because we did not give it is SIZE.

To make a table that is a good size for a website, you can use a percentage that will move and stretch with different size monitor, or a fixed width that will stay consistent no matter what the size of the monitor is. This is always a dilemma with designers. You have to choose which is better for your design. If your design will only look good with a certain size website, use fixed. This blog is a FIXED width.

So you add your width in the

element like this:

You can also use “880px” for a fixed width.

Here are some other common attributes you can add to the

element to change it’s look:

attribute	example
align	“left” “center” “right” – Specifies the alignment of a table according to surrounding text
bgcolor	“#000000″ – Specifies the background color for a table. Get web color codes here
border	“2pixels” - Specifies the width of the borders around a table
cellpadding	“5pixels” – Specifies the space between the cell wall and the cell content
cellspacing	“10pixels” – Specifies the space between cells

guess what, this is a table using the follwing attributes,

< bgcolor>
THIS DOES NOT USE A TABLE BORDER ATTRIBUTE

There was no width set to that above table because there was content in it to stretch it out. If you do not set a width, it will make it as big as it can to fit the content that you put in the

before the
Make sure that you are not missing any ‘>’ or ‘<‘

The next tutorial will be more advanced tables using column spans and row spans and such.

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Creating a Contact Form-w/pictures!

Lindsayanng — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 05:17:29 +0000

I have ALWAYS struggled with creating a contact form, mainly because there are very few good tutorials out there on how to do it.

Well, I finally found a good tutorial on how to make a contact form that WORKS. Now, you have to have dreamweaver if you want to follow this tutorial step by step. If you do not have dreamweaver, you can still use this!!! Just download the file and put it into your website’s folder and skip to the bottom where I have the complete code, copy and paste and change the proper fields to match what you need. If you are confused about what the fields are for, the rest of the tutorial will help you.

The first thing you have to do is download this file:

Click Here To Download

And then unzip it to reveal the FormToEmail.php file. Then you have to move that file to your website’s root folder.

Then you open Dreamweaver and you can either create a new page, or open an existing page that you want to add the contact form to. You should probably view your page in split view so you can see what is happening and make sure things are clean.

Now go to the top menu bar and click INSERT and then FORM and then choose FORM from the top of the flyout menu. It will show you this window:

You will then choose browse for the ACTION and browse to the formtoemail.php file that you just downloaded and put in your website’s folder. You will choose post as your action. You can leave the encoding type blank, and you can choose a name if you would like, something like “quote request” or “product information” You can leave the target blank. You will see code that looks like this:

You will want to put your cursor between the >< and click enter a few times to put some space between the opening and closing
tags.

Now you will go back to Insert and then Form and Label The label is exactly what it sounds like. It is the label for that particular field. You you will write “name” and that will label the field where your visitor will enter their name or “email” for the form where you want them to write their email address. When you insert the label code you will see this:

You will again put your cursor inbetween the tags and type your label there like “name” or “email”

From there you will again go to INSERT and then FORM and then choose TextField. The “TextField” is the actual place where the visitor will enter their name, email, or other information. You will see this box pop up.

You will now put the name of that field in there like “name” or “email”. The value is some text that will be pre filled for the visitor, you can leave this blank. You will then put the size in pixels for the form field. Usually 50px is a good size, and the maximum number of charactors that you would like to put for that field. Click OK and you will see this code:

You have now completed the coding for one field. You can simply copy and paste that code for the other fields and change the names and the labels.

 Name

When you get to pasting the code for the box where you want people to be able to have an unlimited number of lines to fill, like a MESSAGE box, you will click on the radio button that says “Multiline” and you add as many lines as you would like for that form.

You now have to add a submit button

INSERT > FORM > BUTTON and choose submit button from the drop down. This will add your submit button. You can place it where ever you would like.

Your email form will now be technically complete and the code will look like this:


 name
  email
   phone
  message

But it will look like this:

You should definitely subscribe because next we will talk about how to style your contact sheets!

Now, there is ONE last thing to do.

Open the FormToEmail.php file and at the very top change this line to your actual email address.

$my_email="name@yourdomain.com";

You can also create a special page to redirect your customers to after clicking submit by changing this line to an actual file path.

$continue="/";

So that is it. You upload your files to your website and HAVE FUN!!!

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Index.html files in directories.. Why you should use them.

Lindsayanng — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 01:39:57 +0000

If you are new to web design, which most of you are, you might not know the power of the INDEX page.

The index page is the page that a browser will default to when it opens a directory (remember, directory and folder are interchangeable in the web world). This is the reason why your “home page” should always be named “index” and not “home” or “mywebsite.” When someone browses to your website, they we basically looking at your public_html directory, and in that directory it will look for the index page to show the visitor… Then the visitor will click on links in your site and those links will take them away from the index page..

But did you know that a page named index can do more than just be your home page??

One of the most common things that I see when looking at a “newbie’s” website is that they have urls that look like this:
mywebsite.com/flowers/flowers.html
This site has this issue:

This is because they were smart and wanted to organize all of their content into directories, so they put all of the images and content for the “flowers” page in a folder called flowers, and then put the flowers page in there too. Just to keep it all organized. This is actually the BEST practice for building websites. (if you want to learn more about content organization click here).

There are some serious pitfalls of not using index files in your directories as well. When you have a directory, but no index file, people can type in your domain and directory, they will be shown a list of files that exist in that directory. When you have an index, they will always be shown a page. The reason this is bad is, well, you are showing people your “behind the scenes” stuff. This can be an open invite to hackers who will probe around until they find a file that they can use.. It is not worth it..

It also doesn’t look nearly as pretty to see “yourdomain.com/flowers/flowers.html”

To get a url to look nice and clean while also getting your content nicely organized, you simply name the file that is inside of your directory index.html. It will work the same way as your home page, the browser goes to your directory, and instantly defaults to an index.html page. It’s as simple as that.. No secrete trick really, just repeating what you already knew when you started..

So that is it. If you have lots of folders, you will have lots of files called index.html, but they will be nicely organized within the folder that contains all of the other content for your website!

So get organized BEFORE you publish, because once you are published, and you start moving things around, you will get the search engines all sorts of confused, and you want to stay on their good side.

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Filezilla can really be a monster!

Lindsayanng — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 05:33:23 +0000

SO here’s a little tip:
Table borders never really look good. They are two lines that go around the table and usually most people want one solid color line.

THIS IS A TABLE WITH THE TABLE BORDER ATTRIBUTE

THIS IS USING CELLSPACING AND BGCOLOR

As you can see, i kept the basic table layout, but i added cell spacing which puts a space around ALL of the cells (or

tags). Then you add a background color to the entire table, and a different background color to the table cells, or

Definition:

FTP:
FTP is an acronym for File Transfer Protocol It is a method of transferring both ASCII and Binary files between networked computers or hosted servers. When you use FTP for building a website, you are always going to be using your computer to connect to the host’s server. When you set up an account with a host you are basically buying space on a computer that runs 24/7 to put your website on so that other people can access it. Technically you can host a website from your own home computer if you wanted to, but that is not something people do for any public type of website, and its a whole other story.

So now that you have a BASIC understand of what FTP is, let me tell you exactly what you need an FTP program.

You need an FTP program because otherwise, you will not be able to upload your website to your host’s server easily. You can sometimes use your host’s file manager that is built into your control panel to upload and move files, but when you need to move a large chunk of files, FTP is always much easier and faster.

If you use a web building program like dreamweaver, frontpage, iWeb or any other WYSIWYG web design program, you will need to upload your files using FTP because you will be able to build your entire site on your home computer, but then you need to somehow get it on the web for everyone to see. FTP’ing your files to your host is the way you achieve this.

So now that you have the necessities, we will dive into FileZilla, the most popular and free FTP program out there.

Star with downloading FileZilla from this website:
http://filezilla-project.org/
Then download the proper FileZilla CLIENT program for your computer. *note: if you have a mac computer, you HAVE to have OSX 5.0 or higher. It will not work without it.*
When the program is downloaded, you have to unzip the file, and that will give you the FileZilla program. Then open the program and you will see this:

The left side is all of the folders and files that exist on your computer, and the right side is all of the files that exist on your host’s server. The right side will be blank until you give the program the information it needs to connect to your server and see the files.

Before we connect to the server, you want to first see the files for your website on your desktop. With a mac, FileZilla seems to default to open in the Utilities folder. This is weird, since you will never have documents and images in your utilities fold. With a PC, I am not sure where it defaults, but either way, it probably will not be where you want it to be.

So, of the left side, you see two partitions, top left and bottom left. The top left is the main folders and the bottom left is the content of the folder you have chosen. For me, having a mac, I have to choose USERS, then my computer’s user name, and the when I expand that I will see all of the folders that I am used to working with. When I click on DOCUMENTS, you can see the contents of that folder in the bottom left quadrant.

Ok, so now we can see the content that we want to put on the server, but we still have not connected to the server, so this is where you have probably had issues.

To connect to the server:

Click at the icon at the top left that says SITE MANAGER. This will pop up the window where you put in your information.

Click NEW SITE and enter a nickname for your site

Choose FTP type NORMAL

Then you need to enter your HOST. Your HOST is not the name of the company that you use to host your website, nor is it your internet service provider. Your HOST is your website!!! Your domain name/website is where you want to put all of your files right? So it makes sense that your domain is your host. This is also where the HOST name can vary. It all depends on your host, and whether or not you have a static IP. Sometimes filezilla will require that you input your domain’s IP address, other times it requires your domain name. If you enter a domain name, make sure to put the “http://” before the domain name. If you do not know your IP address, you can log into your host’s control panel to find it, OR you can call your host.

You can leave the PORT empty unless your host requires it, which is unlikely if you have a good host.

Then you have to enter your username and password. This also can vary based on your host. If you have a good host, what would usually be done is when you create an account at your host, they automatically make the SAME username and password for your FTP login. If not, you will have to log in to your control panel and make one. If you are unsure if this was done, just try using the username and password to log in to your account and see if it works. If not, and you are confused, you are best off asking your host by calling their customer service. Ok you can send me an email and I might be able to help. Just be aware that host’s all have very different control panels.

You can leave the ACCOUNT and COMMENTS field empty. You will not need these.

Once you have entered your username and password, click CONNECT and the site manager window will close. You will see that the top box that stretches all the way across the top of the window will start showing you the log of what is happening while FileZilla starts connecting to your host.

If the connection was successful, you will see this in your log:

and your files that exist on your server will also now show in the right quadrants.

Otherwise, you will see some connection errors in red, or something that tells you that your uysername or password is incorrect.

So now lets say that you want to put your ENTIRE website that you created in Dreamweaver, iWeb, Frontpage, or other web designer program. What you would do is look at your Server’s files/folders. You will see a LOT of folders that do not mean a lot to you. The ONLY one that concerns you when you are working with adding content to your website is the public_html folder. public_html is where all of the files that are available on the internet go. This would also include files that you might have that are for administration only. For instance, if you have a shopping cart or wordpress website that has an admin side that only you want to see, it would still go in the public_html folder, that does not mean that just anyone can access it because these scripts usually automatically create a password to access the content of those folders.

Now, to upload your entire website, you will go back over to the LOCAL side (on the left) and click open the folder that contains your entire website and select all of the content by clicking on the first file, hold shift and then click on the bottom file to select all of it. You do NOT want to upload the folder, because then you will have to type in yourdomain.com/foldername to see your website, instead of just yourdomain.com.

Once you have all of the files and folders selected, just right click (or ctrl click if a mac) and choose UPLOAD from the menu. When you click upload, you will see the top and bottom boxes give you all of the information about what is being uploaded. You really do not need to read all of that unless something fails.

You will then see the all of the content that you uploaded on your server side (right quadrant) of filezilla and you should be able to go to your internet browser and type in your domain and see the website that you created, live and on the web!!!

If you just want to upload a file to a website that is already created, the process is similar. However, this time you will open the public_html folder and you will see all of the files and folders that you already have on your website. You would then use the server side (right quadrant) to browse to the folder which you would like to upload the file to, and select that file. Then you would browse to the LOCAL folder on the right side, then just select the singular file and right click (or ctrl click on a mac) and choose UPLOAD from that menu. When it is finished, you will see the file now showing on the server side. Its a wonderful thing, because now you are DONE. FileZilla also does a DRAG AND DROP where you can select a file or files from your local side and drop them in a folder on the remote site and it will upload the same.

Now, what if there are files on your website that you want to download to your computer. This is easy as well. You just use the server side (the right quadrant) to browse to the file that you want to download, then right click (or ctrl click) and choose DOWNLOAD. You can also delete the file entirely from your website if you wish.

Sometimes you will also hear that you have to change “permissions” on your file or folder. You can do this through FileZilla as well! When you right click (or ctrl click) on a file/folder on your remote side (the right quadrant) you will see file permissions as an option. When you click that, a new window will open where you can change the file permissions of that folder. If you want to learn more about what file permissions are, click here and read this post.

Also, sometimes when you want to upload a bunch of files, you want to create a new folder to put them in so that everything stays organized. This is also simple. You select the folder that you want the few folder to be in (you can choose public_html or any folder in side of public_html) and then right click (or ctrl click) and choose CREATE DIRECTORY. In the world of web design, you will find that the word FOLDER and DIRECTORY will be interchanged a lot. Directory means folder, and folder means directory.

So that is it. This your FileZilla for Idiots tutorial.. Now, since hosts are ALL different, you might have to play with the login a little. If you have to do something a little different to log in, PLEASE post a comment here with the name of your host, and how you did it!! If you can NOT figure it out, and your host is of NO help what so ever, feel free to email me, and I will help walk you through it.

I also suggest that you PRINT THIS PAGE and follow it as you go. CLICK HERE:

Note: There is a print link embedded within this post, please visit this post to print it.

P.S. If you do have one of those hosts that will not help you, or only offers e-mail support when you need support NOW, you should consider changing hosts. I always 100% stand by HOSTMONSTER as the best host out there with TOP NOTCH customer support. When i first started, I didn’t have someone around to explain these things to me, LUCKILY I had went with hostmonster and they actually stayed on the phone with me for about an hour helping me to connect to my ftp, teaching me about how to use my control panel, AND helping me with learning a little more about Dreamweaver (which is WAY above and beyond). Because, when I started, I had NO CLUE how to get a website from my computer, to the internet.

To read about how easy it is to switch hosts, CLICK HERE and read about my experience with changing hosts.

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All About SSL (Secure Socket Layer) – for the web design impaired..

Lindsayanng — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 01:15:11 +0000

SSL (secure socket layer) is essentially an encrypted tunnel that you pass all infomation that goes from your customer to your database through. SSL IS NESSECARY TO HAVE A SUCCESSFUL STORE. Just check out any e-commerce store, when you go there you will see that they have SSL. I also just recently got a forward from my grandma (she is the MASTER of forwarding useless stuff) that was telling all her other not-so-techy friends that you should never purchase from a website that does not have the “https” beginning and does not have the little lock. So now that there is a wide spread e-mail being passed around, it is more important than ever.

You know a website has SSL when you go to any page that collects personal data (including email, passwords, shipping, and payment info) and the url changes from http://website.com to https://website.com You also see a little padlock in the browser and some even change color on secure pages.

SSLs are not expensive, and you can get a FREE shared SSL from most hosts.

A shared SSL is an OK solution. Basically, when your SSL is shared, ALL of the pages on your site that should be secure (login, create account, shipping, payment, etc) will change from

http://yourdomain.com

https://server123.hostname.com/~yourdomain

this is not ideal because it can freak out customers who obsessively check the URL to make sure they are not getting scammed. When the .com name changes, even though your name is in that url at the end, they might not trust it because people don’t know too much about how this stuff works.

With a dedicated SSL (which costs about $70 a YEAR with a dedicated IP address) your url changes just from

http://yourdomain.com

to
https://yourdomain.com

BUT, this has nothing to do with credit card information. BY LAW YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO STORE CREDIT CARD DATA UNLESS YOU MEET CERTAIN STANDARDS OR REQUIREMENTS. You need to be PCI COMPLIANT

You really SHOULD try to become PCI compliant even if you don’t store credit cards.

However, if you have a merchant account (either from a bank, card processing company or something like paypal) chances are they will do all of that for you since they are the only ones that really need to SEE the customer’s credit card number.

With a merchant account, you need a SECURE GATEWAY. These sometimes come with a merchant account, and sometimes you have to pay for them. Depends on the company. I have heard just about everything from just about every company. One bank wanted to charge me $800 for a secure gateway, while I have heard that others got theirs for free when they signed up for their merchant account. Paypal lets you use theirs, I have paypal’s website payments pro to be the best start-up option.

The secure gateway is similar to the SSL where the customer inputs their data and that data is transmitted through encryption. But instead of sending the data to you, that part of the data (cc info) goes to the company that is processing the credit card. There also is not change in url or webpages. This is done behind the scenes.

So basically, thats it.. Thats what you need to be secure. MOST people dont care.. they think they will not be victims to hackers.. but guess what, if a customer gets their info stolen from your site and you did not take the proper precautions, its YOU that will pay, because 9 times out of 10, the person who did the stealing of the info is untraceable and from another country.

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A rare Gem in a Sea of Information

Lindsayanng — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 03:33:32 +0000

I think I found it. The perfect solution to teaching yourself HOW to make oscommerce LOOK good.

We all know that the stock oscommerce will NOT turn your e-commerce business into a world dominating retailer. Its made to be a skeleton which you should build on.. The thing is, unless you are an expert coder, you can’t just jump in and make it look like the professional store that you want. You can have all of the graphic design skills in the world, but you NEED to know how to change what you see on your screen into what you see in your mind.

So this is the book i URGE you to pick up:
oscbook designing oscommerce

WHY buy a book when you can get all the info you ever want on the internet for free??
Well, thats an easy one. Because contrary to popular belief, forums do NOT give you instant feedback.. Books do! The only thing you have to do with a book is look in the index. With a forum you have to first search your question, then weed through all of the useless posts, then when you can’t find the answer, ask the question and HOPE someone sees it before it gets buried in the sea of useless stupid ANNOYING questions like “How do I change the text on my website”
BOOKS will always be sitting there on your shelf, so when you need to re-teach something to yourself, you don’t have to pull your hair out because you didn’t bookmark that page.
IF YOU’RE INTERESTED IN GETTING STARTED MAKING YOUR SITE LOOK LIKE YOU ENVISION IT – click the BUY NOW button to go to paypal and checkout to get your book ASAP

If you want more information, you can visit the writer’s website HERE

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Because oscommerce is so darn confusing…

Lindsayanng — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 19:20:33 +0000

I have officially been working with oscommerce for 2 years now, and I started by learning the good old fashioned way – that is MAKING MISTAKES!! Thank god that I have the good frame of mind to backup my work before i even START thinking about making changes to my site.. But here’s the thing, there are a few tips that can make doing things in oscommerce a tad bit easier.

First is ALWAYS MAKE A BACKUP because you WILL mess up, and you WILL cry long hours if you don’t
Second, USE A MERGE PROGRAM! Its so obvious, but yet people still forget that they exist. When you install contributions, dont go through the code piece by piece, just open the contribution file and your file side by side and merge them. You can use WinMerge(for PC) or DiffMerge(for mac) BOTH are free, and both will save you a LOT of time.

and FINALLY. GOOGLE YOUR ISSUES!! There is nothing more annoying than going to a user forum and seeing the same issue posted over and over again. And the thing is, these people THINK they will get instant gratification because they THINK people will just come by and give them an answer. Well, that’s rarely true. If you simply go head over to google and type in the following into the search form:
site:forums.oscommerce.com then paste your error here
You will get ALL of the threads on that site that reference your particular error.

Now there is one bit of info that I have to give you that might be common sense to one person, but not to the others.. When you copy your error, DONT include your file path. No one else in the world is going to have the same file path as you. So JUST include the error. PLEASE.

We all know that the user forums are VERY helpful, but we all have to remember that oscommerce is FREE and that the support given is literally people giving their own FREE TIME to answer your questions. No one is ENTITLED to any support, and no one has to give YOU customer support, but we do. We all have a passion for what we do, and I personally am a strong believer in that you should put back what you take away. So if you are getting answers to all of your questions in the forum, then you should also answer other people’s questions. Who cares HOW newbie you are, you will still have someone else in there that has a question that you already answered. So when you get a problem solved, head over to the installation or general forum and see what newbie YOU can help!

So that’s it for now. It know its been a while since I updated, but i promise, i will be back more often. I will try to update at minumum once a week. In the meantime, if you have questions about oscommerce, please post them here or CONTACT ME I will be happy to answer them.

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Someone called me a non-technical person

Lindsayanng — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 19:51:37 +0000

Hah, i was in a forum today, trying to figure out this debocle with my shared SSL (secure socket layer). What i realized was, my website NEEDS to have a cookie in the users browser, but when you visit a SHARED ssl page, the domain changes, and since the cookie is only valid on the original domain, every time the person goes to a secure page, they loose their shopping cart contents!!! What a MESS!!

Anways, I was just learning all of that stuff above by trial and error. THEN, someone came of the forum and said to me “I will try to put this in the most simple terms possible since you are not really Tech-y”

HAH!! for an average person, I feel that I am rather “tech-y” I mean, when I explain to other people how I built my website and the stuff that I have done, they look at me like I have three heads. That makes me pretty “tech-y” i would think. I guess there are levels of “tech-y” and when you are in a support forum for a complicated script, people like us probably are the least “tech-y” people there. Ok, well not the LEAST, the people who are the least “tech-y” people there are the ones who don’t know what php is. People like me one year ago.

SO anyways, I still feel rather proud of myself for being able to completely confuse people with my mumbojumbo “tech-y” talk, even if it is the average folk.

So today’s lesson is:
A shared SSL is always going to change the domain name in the user’s url because the secure pages reside on that secure server, which is being shared.
That means that if your domain name (mydomain.com) puts a cookie in the persons’ browser to be used, when the user goes to a secure page (secure.host.com/mydomain) then the cookie is not valid and will not be used resulting in the loss of infomation that was stored on that cookie.

You can get around this by using session ids, which we will cover later. But that is only good for some scripts which can use session ids. My particular one can not.

Anways, I love my host for sitting on the phone with me last night a midnite helping me with things (even with CODING which they arent supposed to do) and for now officially getting me a nice, cheap private SSL and static IP

I <3 Hostmonster.com

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