Argh, tables! Say no more, guys! :x :roll:

I use the Bravenet free metatag creator, which puts a revisit tag in the code automatically, which is pretty useful.

Bought myself a Java Made Simple book today, so you may guess what I'll be doing this weekend. Look out for my scripts popping up all over the place next week (lol, yeah right).

Hi guys,

The answer to most of the Frontpage problems is CSS, you can avoid all the problems associated with tables completely.

Still it depends how simple you want things to be (the simple the better I suppose)

I'm not gonna try and sell anyone on Frontpage because as with most things personal preference is more important that features.

LennyT

p.s. Richard - what was the code you recently got to help with your online purchasing system? Anything useful to us mere mortals?. I'm about to start working with a few people to sell their products online so it's gonna become a much bigger issue for me soon.

Hi LennyT

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div>

Richard - what was the code you recently got to help with your online purchasing system?[/b]

It was a callback script designed to work with WorldPay. Basically when someone purchases an ebook it directs them to the correct download page and fires off an email confirming the order and repeating the download information.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div>

Anything useful to us mere mortals?[/b]

Not unless anyone is using WorldPay to process payments for eBook purchases

Cheers

Richard
TheTrader

K,

It seems to be a popular business process these days to sell on whatever utility you have created as there are bound to be other people who want it.

I thought you'd have considered this already, but it was worth asking. I'll bear it in mind for future reference (as I'm going to be putting lots of digital products online for various people very soon) and you could recoup the cost of the script.

Regards,

LennyT

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div>

It seems to be a popular business process these days to sell on whatever utility you have created as there are bound to be other people who want it. *[/b]

Very true and of course it did cross my mind. However, it took my software guy about 3 days to get it working on my server and everyone's web host is slightly different so for the sake of a $50 sale, I can do without the hassle of providing the technical support

Cheers

Richard
TheTrader

Richard,

On this same note - with the large amount of products I'll be storing and (hopefully) delivering soon, do you have any recommendations for ways of storing or delivering that have helped you avoid excessive ISP bandwidth charges etc...

I will basically be developing a central site which will have minisites providing different types and amounts of digital products, plus links into and out of the main site to affiliate sites (some of which I am currently developing and providing online purchasing facilities for).

I am a bit wary about the possible large bandwidth requirements of having several popular sites running from my ISP, so if you have any recommendations for ways to make the process more efficient that'd be great.

Regards,

LennyT.

p.s. If anyone's interested in learning how to make their web pages able to be personalised with peoples names (i.e. Instead of it saying "Hi, welcome" it could say "Hi Richard, welcome" I've just been having a little play and I can now send my newsletter readers to personalised pages.

I haven't had time to implement anything spectacular, but if anyone else has the time to play I'll happily write a short article for the forum on how to go about it...

Hi Lenny

Bandwidth is often something that people forget to consider when setting up new websites. In fairness, for a 'normal' site, it may not necessarily be a consideration, but if you are offering downloadable products then it certainly will be as your traffic increases.

I have a 'Resellers' account for all of my websites, which basically entitles me to host as many domains as I want with unlimited bandwidth on each. The downside of such an arrangement is that I pay close to £1000 a year for the service.

This is clearly not very cost effective for a new business (and indeed probably not necessary anyway as a limited bandwidth of, say 10GB - 20GB a month will probably be more than adequate initially). I used to use (and am happy to recommend) a US company called www.powweb.com They offer fixed price hosting (from memory it is about $7.77 a month) and this includes a bandwidth allowance of 30GB per month.

The only thing I am not sure of is whether you can host more than one domain on a single package - I suspect not....

Hope this helps.

Richard
TheTrader

Thanks Richard,

I am aiming to try and diversify the core business and effectively end up with each external affiliate running from a separate hosting package.

At the moment my 'business' package gives me more than enough, but my partners are working on relationships with several famous musical artsists who are interested in getting their products online and I need to decide beforehand what will be the best way. I can upgrade my 'business' package to a 'pro' package, but the bandwidth limitation seems to be something that is non-linear with respect to the other increased benefits and I can see that as soon as we get running back up to 100,000 visitors a month, if we're also offering free samples and products, we're going to come unstuck if we haven't planned it well.

I suppose there's nothing to stop me migrating separate areas onto other ISP packages to spread the load if it gets too much (for a nominal fee a new package with 10GB of bandwidth might work out cheaper than trying to integrate more capacity into 1 package, plus all my other sites are currently bundled into this package and I could 'move' those into a new one.

I'm gonna have to have a good think this weekend. I have a meeting in 8 days with one of the artists to get the proposal fixed before he leaves the country for several months.

I'm actually very happy with the current provider and the funtionality and facilities they offer, but I don't want to blindly charge into a 'seemed like a good idea at the time' situation that ends up causing major headaches for the sake of a bit of planning.

Am i thinking out loud now?.. I can't remember what started this reply..
Oh yeh - hosting etc..

Thanks for your reply Richard.


LennyT