i am currently working on coding HTML Templates for an E-Commerce Shop (Magento).
We want to send out daily Mails with recently uploaded products.
Right now, we would have to dive in to the html each time, change img tags etc. for each product (about 10 per mail).
So here is my question: Is it possible to automate put in new products automatically each day? I've read about the Magento RSS Feed and the Combination of Mailchimp Mergetags to display the latest products. Is this the best way to do this or are there any other ways to automate this?
I talked to some Friends of mine, who said that RSS is supposedly "dead" and this would be, if it would even work, rather a quick hack than a long-term sustainable solution.
So I would be thankful if someone has an insight here.
This is a viable solution. Besides this, you'd probably have to look into the API's of each service. Ultimately the API would give you the most 'automatic' result, but it would take some coding to set that up for your specific needs.
Give the RSS a go.
Related
By "dynamic links", I mean a list of links that will constantly be updated.
To illustrate my question, I have a website that I am constantly writing new articles for. I currently have about 10 articles. If someone is to read article #5, there is a list of links to all 10 articles in the right panel of the page. As I update the site, and article #1 becomes out of date, I'd like to replace article #1 with article #11. Rather than updating the links within every article (so 10 times), is there a way to update the links once and have them all update simultaneously to every page?? Could I create an iframe for this??
Thanks for any and all help!
What's your goal? Do you want to learn to be a web developer? Or are you mostly concerned with getting your articles published?
If you want to be a web developer, I'd recommend steering clear of large CMS system like Wordpress or Drupal. Those are great products. But you want to learn the basics first. I think starting a PHP tutorial is the way to go.
If you just want to publish your articles, I'd recommend you find a nice place to create a blog. There are so many to choose from. It all depends on how much you want to spend.
Feel free to ask follow up questions. Web development sounds simple. But it's really a complex topic. I can't imagine what is must be like starting out these days with so many choices and competing technologies.
One way to do it would be to use Server-side includes. (Wikipedia) They work like this:
<!--#include file="some-content.html" -->
or
<!--#include virtual="some-folder/some-content.html" -->
The difference is file="" finds a file relative to the current page, whereas virtual="" finds it from the domain root. Either way, this method can use any type of regular text file as a source. The actual addition of the content is done by the server (hence the name) so its contents will be parsed as regular HTML and all CSS will apply to it as if the file were part of your page. I don't know about compatibility with different hosts, but if your web server supports it, this is probably the easiest way to go.
I do small websites for local companies. All I know is HTML5 and CSS3, no JavaScript, no PHP.
I have this client who wants me to make a website for his coffee shop. All good so far. I have an idea for a beautiful responsive design which will get his coffee shop a lot of fame.
The problem:
The guy wants to be able to manage his website, meaning: he wants to add a photo if he needs to, or even some text on a particular page. He doesn't want to depend on me so he wants to do it by himself. The problem is that I can't teach him HTML so he would download the HTML file and write the code for the desired thing.. I need to do beautiful websites for my portfolio.
No Wordpress: I don't like Wordpress because it's limited so I can't be creative with the design. I thought of that as being the only solution requiring his needs.
I'm willing to learn more: if there is a solution that I could implement in one month or two, I will do this and learn what is needed, but can't learn PHP in two months.
Any advice?
You might find that CushyCMS does what you want. From the site:
Allow clients to safely edit content
No software to install, no programming required
Takes just a few minutes to setup
Define exactly which parts of the page can be changed
Produces standards compliant, search engine friendly content
From experience, a couple of downsides:
No choice of editor
You have to add pages that can be edited - the client cannot create new pages.
There are many websites out there selling HTML templates to use for your own website.
I've bought many web templates in the past, but it just dawned on me;
Most of them offer full previews of the websites they are selling - essentially offering the product for free, since one can just use "View Source Code" and copy-paste the HTML, CSS, JS, et al. into their own program.
I just tried it out myself with this theme from Themeforest and I was able to copy most of the site from the preview (some parts are a bit messy).
My question is: are there functionalities that are impossible to get without buying the website, or is it all just essentially running on the honor system?
Any PHP site you cannot copy the PHP code behind it (or any kind of server-side code) which means that contact forms, newsletter subscriptions etc will not work unless you write your own PHP code for them, however everything else works pretty much fine. It is equivalent of downloading something over a torrent or similar. It is illegal, and not to mention unfair to the developers that have spent time creating the template.
If you will just manually copy and not buying the template from themeforest or other template sites, you won't get any technical support from author and any succeeding updates from the template. I guess it's also a form of piracy.
So, buying premium templates is beneficial to you and to your clients.
Like Benedict Lewis said, you're just copying the static HTML and none of the server side code. You wouldn't be able to use this is WordPress (or whatever CMS the theme is made for). You'd have to manually create new pages, edit them, and and upload them to your site, which is a pain.
Plus you're stealing someone's work which may be copyrighted.
I was wondering, how does a web designer/developer start out in his buisness with nothing to show (in the sense of a portfolio,) and only his word to show he does good work? How are those people supposed to get buisness?
If you don't have a portfolio and want business, it is best to make your own site look incredible. Show people what you can do with your own site. Once your site is incredible, network with companies in your area, friends, family and offer your services cheap if they'll let you use their site as a portfolio example.
Once your portfolio is up, referrals should be coming in and folks seeing your site should be even more interested.
EDIT Per Martin's request, when you build your own site, please don't grab a run of the mill template like every other web developer out there. If you do take a template, make it yours, modify the heck out of it.
The best thing you can do for an empty portfolio is personal projects. I was hired for my first job out of college because I had created a website for my personal business. I was able to show that I had talent because I was in charge the entire site. You shouldn't ever rely on "your word" to get you jobs.
If you need ideas for a personal project, you can see if any friends/family need help, but that can be limiting. Still, it's another project to put in your portfolio to help you get more professional work.
I'd also recommend reading up on online articles dealing with starting a business. Some recommended reading:
alistapart.com/articles/startingabusiness/
alistapart.com/articles/business1/
freelanceswitch.com/general/101-essential-freelancing-resources/
Start by doing projects for people you know and work to create a small selection of work that reflects your current skill set. At the beginning, you may find that your talents are evolving so rapidly that your previous work doesn't reflect your current abilities — that's fine. Try to create a narrative on your portfolio site that shows people your progress and how each piece of work has built on the next.
Your portfolio site should demonstrate both technical and aesthetic skills. If you're an artist or industrial designer, you want your site to fade to the background and push your work forwards. Being a web designer means that your actual site is as important as the work featured on it. Your code should be clean and organized (you don't need to be a standardista, but be tidy).
If there's one skill you should really have before you start to work for clients, it's a sense of typography. You don't want to contribute to the ever-expanding world of poorly set websites.
Good luck.
I completely agree with all of the above - if you can demonstrate your capabilities with some sample work, that will count for far more than a resume in the end. Most of my work has come through people seeing my other work, not knowing my employment history.
Get yourself a domain, build a bunch of sample home pages, create a bunch of sub directories on your site. Make one for a small business, then maybe e-commerce, then maybe a blog, make a few different example scenarios of the types of sites that you would likely be asked to do, I have seen some people design mock home pages in Photoshop and just show them all as clickable JPEGS, that can be quick yes, although I recommend using all live pages on your site to show what interactive things you can do. Up to you, depending how quick you want it up and how important it is to you. I was paid $2500 to make this blog by a guy who was just completely web illiterate. I didn't quote that price mind you, he offered it to me out of nowhere after looking at a gallery of WP templates I had up as "possible" themes for a customer's blog. Sometimes, you are just in the right place at the right time. Best of luck to you.
Do side projects and see if you can build friends' websites (for free, or if they'll pay you, cool). Do whatever you can to demonstrate your abilities. Building a personal site doesn't hurt either.
I'd recommend making an online portfolio, if not to display past projects at least to post your resume and basically a cover letter. You can get a lot of free css templates if you're not comfortable with designing your own.
I'm building a site for my wife and a friend of mine from high school. If you're not getting work, its just the economy. I've been looking for work since March. It's tough.
Just keep at it, and it'll pay off.
You need to create a professional looking site. If you are a developer I also suggest that you start a small open source project (or a big one if you are so inclinded). It doesn't have to be any thing major...a widget or library. Something useful for people to play with. On your website show examples of your work. If you have no examples then sign up for accounts on getafreelancer.com, elance.com, scriptlance.com, guru.com, rentacoder.com and any of the other freelance style sites. Build up your portfolio by doing cheap work...but not work that is cheap! Create a resume and post it somewhere for google to find. Create a linkedin, facebook, and myspace account. Make it easy for people to find you and for people to find your work. Write about the things that you are interested in either by way of a personal blog or by posting articles to a site that already gets lots of traffic. Speak at small user groups or conferences to get your name out.
There is a lot you can do it is just a matter of how badly you want to succeed. Programming or designing is just as much a business as selling physical products. It is all about how much you saturate a given space with good words about your services. Marketing!
I am working with an artist to make her personal website. She would like to sell her artwork from the website. The issue is, she would like to be able to add, remove and price the artwork herself. She would also like to use paypal as the payment method.
Obviously design and coding is easy for me, that's all static. I am not sure however, what the best method would be to set up a way for her to add artwork herself.
I know there are some open source e-commerce sites (magento, zencart ect.) but I have never used these and feel they might be a bit overkill for a simple art site. Is there something else really simple I should use?
Any general thoughts or suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
Use a ecommerce site, its the obvious choice if she wants to sell stuff.
Zencart isn't as overkill as you think - it allows you to remove all the bits you don't want from the site using its admin gui; so you keep just the categories and the cart sections.
It also has options (IIRC, but I may be thinking of a different one, like CRELoaded) that provide for pay-and-download links.
Certainly, reusing ecommerce code will be a lot easier than writing your own.
Always use an existing framework for commercial sites. It's just too easy to make a silly mistake which allows hackers to take over control of the server.
I recently found a really cool (and free) method of using php and javascript to upload, resize thumbnails, and display all uploaded content from the folder.
Taking this code from a free tutorial and pairing it with a customized javascript gallery looks really slick (used it for my own photography site as well as a few clients who loved it).
Very soon I will be combining it with a site for a historical golf course architect... a gentleman has come to me with hundreds of pictures he would like to store on the web, but he wants the capability to upload himself at any time. The trick is this: If your client artist wants to price it herself, the gallery use would require her to be able to navigate the basic html framework enough to change the descriptions which appear beneath all of the pictures as she adds/changes them.
If you want to get started on your own check out some of the tutorials here:
http://net.tutsplus.com/category/videos/screencasts/page/3/
as well as finding a gallery that you both like for displaying the photos in an attractive way... Let me know if you want anything else from me :)
Why don't you create a simple administration panel where s/he can add, remove and price the artwork? Do you know any programming languages? PHP?
Virtuemart is based Joomla CMS , very easy to set up, an Open Source eCommerce solution. You might find a lot of free extensions of Joomla for photo gallery and other things.
Gallery2 is an excellent web-gallery software, suitable for presenting images, videos, and audio.
It has a "CheckOut with PayPal" plugin.
Gallery2 will require some time to configure, it is unlikely that you will use it "as is" after install.
Gallery2 is easily embeddable - provided minimal PHP skills, and good HTML/CSS skills, one can make it fit inside any design (maybe except for the grid-like thumbnails layout, which I guess is possible but harder than average).