Advice on making a website from scratch

[PaulC]

... but I thought the internet was free and no-one has to pay anything.

A busy forum like this must use up a lot of b/w

[darrenm]

 

 

 

To be honest £11,000 sounds totally extortinate

It depends what you want really.

£11,000 would get you 10 days of my time.

 

 

Are you Stephen Ireland?

 

 

If I was it'd be more like £11k for 1 day.

 

Sadly I see nowhere near that amount, that's just how much the company I work for bill our clients for my time.

The point being web development can get very expensive depending on what you want, and as always, you generally get what you pay for.

 

Unless of course if it's to develop anything in .Net, IIS and SQL, where you definitely don't get what you pay for

[TheDon]

 

 

 

 

To be honest £11,000 sounds totally extortinate

It depends what you want really.

£11,000 would get you 10 days of my time.

 

 

Are you Stephen Ireland?

 

 

If I was it'd be more like £11k for 1 day.

 

Sadly I see nowhere near that amount, that's just how much the company I work for bill our clients for my time.

The point being web development can get very expensive depending on what you want, and as always, you generally get what you pay for.

 

Unless of course if it's to develop anything in .Net, IIS and SQL, where you definitely don't get what you pay for

 

 

It's like you've been reading my job description

 

I didn't like asp.net or IIS when I started out, but it's incredibly powerful if you use it properly. As long as you get well away from the messy world of doing databinding in markup and into the beautiful forest of MVC it's a dream to work with.

[PaulC]

never ever used .net myself. I just started out with plain old asp and iis with access database and vbscript. Then why not move to Linux and php with MySQL its cheaper and easier to learn.

[darrenm]

 

 

It's like you've been reading my job description

 

I didn't like asp.net or IIS when I started out, but it's incredibly powerful if you use it properly. As long as you get well away from the messy world of doing databinding in markup and into the beautiful forest of MVC it's a dream to work with.

 

 

I think we had this discussion before so I knew you were on 'the dark side' (as compared to the beautiful light of freedom of open-source ).

 

Coming from the sysadmin side I know the pains of the Microsoft stack all too well, but developers love it, managers love it and directors love. Even some sysadmins with MS qualifications quite like it.

 

My main gripe is the scalability TBH. There's a reason 19 out of the 20 busiest sites in the world use Apache/Nginx+Linux+MySQL (albeit a completely different version to what's commonly available) and it's that IIS doesn't perform very well, and that SQL only vertically scales. But with the crazy x86 hardware out there these days, even a single SQL node is enough for all but the most demanding workloads so it's much less of an issue anyway. Also IO is becoming less of an issue with massive write caches and SSDs on SANs.

 

I can appreciate the comment about MVC. I do a bit in Django (knowing a bit of Python) and MVC (or MTV in Django's case) is like object-oriented programming in that it maps correctly to human thinking.

[Big_John_10]

I think that's the first post I've read on VT that I seriously have no idea what any of it means or could even mean.

Wish I was more technically minded.

[PaulC]

I think that's the first post I've read on VT that I seriously have no idea what any of it means or could even mean.

Wish I was more technically minded.

 

 

lol, you don't need to know all that though its just going to confuse the issue. Best to stick to what you know and pick up things gradually because it can really do your head in.

[limpid]

 

... but I thought the internet was free and no-one has to pay anything.

A busy forum like this must use up a lot of b/w

 

It does and yet some people still use adblockers.

[darrenm]

 

I think that's the first post I've read on VT that I seriously have no idea what any of it means or could even mean.

Wish I was more technically minded.

 

 

lol, you don't need to know all that though its just going to confuse the issue. Best to stick to what you know and pick up things gradually because it can really do your head in.

 

Yep, I'm half rambling about infrastructure, hardware, and industry terms there so best to ignore it

 

The best place to start off from is installing a Ubuntu server inside of VirtualBox, get a well-recommended teach yourself PHP, Apache and MySQL book and start amazing yourself by looping through database rows.

 

Or, if you don't want to start learning how to web develop, pick a product that most closely fits your web site needs and dive into learning that. Generally you'll be choosing between Drupal, Joomla, or Wordpress for most web sites.

 

You'll generally always need to know how to change your site's look and feel though, so you'll always need to learn how CSS and HTML layouts work. Use Chrome on any web page, press CTRL-SHIFT-I and start fiddling with changing colours, CSS and HTML to learn what does what.

[PaulC]

Or you could just install xampp on your computer, start apache and MySQL services, run phpmyadmin and create a username and database then you can use Dreamweaver or any  webdesign package with a WYSIWYG editor and create and site and you can test it on your local server. That way it costs you absolutely nothing. You can get a 30 day trial of Dreamweaver. Once you finished a site you can purchase a hosting package and upload it to the remote server. There are plenty of free web editors around.

Edited April 24, 2013 by PaulC

[Big_John_10]

After some more advice as I'm clueless!!

Not 100% sure Weebly prevents people from downloading video content from your page. Is there a way I can prevent this? Weebly does allow you to enter your own code so is this something that could be done quite simply or is it a bit of a massive job?

My website is going to be a subscription type so obviously don't want members to download all the content and then cancel their subscription. Any suggestions to how I could solve this potential problem?

Or is there a way, like apple do with their rent a film option, where you download it but it will automatically delete after a select amount of days? Again is that something that would be highly technical to do?

Edited April 26, 2013 by Big_John_10

[PaulC]

Yes it can be done quite easily with sql and php. Within a database you have a users, Products and orders table. Each table has its own unique ID. within the orders table you have two foreign keys for the User and Product. So when a person orders a film to download they are forced to login and then when they pay for that video it inserts a new order and the userID and ProductID is then added to that order.

So then for instance have a download.php page where the products paid for will be available to download, if you want have it available for 30 days then you can do that with simple sql query.

Hope this helps.

Look mate check out!

http://www.webassist.com/web-apps/powerstore

I don't use it because I use Dreamweaver but that will do everything you want and you don't need any prior knowledge. Their support is great. Fantastic support forum. 15 day money back. Let me know if you want to order it because I can get a referral lol

[b23avfc]

Not to make limpid wince but i'm interesting in running a second wordpress site, and it looks fiddly to me.. if anybody has a simple way of me doing this then holla

[MMFy]

Tip. Buy your domain yourself through someone who will register it in your name (like ukreg.com). That way you can't held to ransom by the "free" hosting companies if the site takes off.

 

Mrs MMFy is setting up a website through Weebly (for a village hall) and wants to register a URL to point at it.  When she went through ukreg it redirected to fasthosts.com.  Does anyone know if this is expected, and is this a decent way to register a domain?

Also, if you've paid for the domain name for two years, is it going to cost the same to renew it at the end of that period?

 

Any help will be appreciated.

 

Cheers.

[PaulC]

You need to change the nameservers because they are just set to the default ones. Prices can fluctuate but not by that much. I use namealerts for all my domains.

[limpid]

 

Tip. Buy your domain yourself through someone who will register it in your name (like ukreg.com). That way you can't held to ransom by the "free" hosting companies if the site takes off.

 

Mrs MMFy is setting up a website through Weebly (for a village hall) and wants to register a URL to point at it.  When she went through ukreg it redirected to fasthosts.com.  Does anyone know if this is expected, and is this a decent way to register a domain?

Also, if you've paid for the domain name for two years, is it going to cost the same to renew it at the end of that period?

 

Any help will be appreciated.

 

Cheers.

 

fasthosts = ukreg. They've been the registrar for villatalk.com since 2002.

 

You are only renting the domain so you will have to pay again when the rental period is over. The price may change, but is unlikely to change much. If it does change you can move to a different registrar as the domain is in your name,

[TheDon]

After some more advice as I'm clueless!!

Not 100% sure Weebly prevents people from downloading video content from your page. Is there a way I can prevent this? Weebly does allow you to enter your own code so is this something that could be done quite simply or is it a bit of a massive job?

My website is going to be a subscription type so obviously don't want members to download all the content and then cancel their subscription. Any suggestions to how I could solve this potential problem?

Or is there a way, like apple do with their rent a film option, where you download it but it will automatically delete after a select amount of days? Again is that something that would be highly technical to do?

You seriously want to do a pay for subscription site on the cheap?

 

I'm sorry but you're just asking for trouble. Sure it's possible, if you have the knowledge, but you seem absolutely clueless about everything. This is why people want to charge you a fortune, because they have the knowledge. If your site is vulnerable to just one sql injection attack then you're done for.

 

Yes it can be done quite easily with sql and php. Within a database you have a users, Products and orders table. Each table has its own unique ID. within the orders table you have two foreign keys for the User and Product. So when a person orders a film to download they are forced to login and then when they pay for that video it inserts a new order and the userID and ProductID is then added to that order.

This won't do what he's asking.

You'd still be able to subscribe and then pull down all the content you have access to and then watch it after your subscription has elapsed.

There's no way to do what he wants without using DRM to license the videos.

[PaulC]

Not if you put in a simple sql query so it only shows the downloads for 30 days or whatever the subscription length is. I have done this on many of my sites before.

[TheDon]

Not if you put in a simple sql query so it only shows the downloads for 30 days or whatever the subscription length is. I have done this on many of my sites before.

Congratulations.

Then what stops them subscribing for 30 days, downloading the entire contents of your website, and then watching the videos after that 30 day period?

I can pull back an entire website with 1 wget command. Your sql query does nothing to prevent me from doing that.

[PaulC]

Yes fair enough, I just thought he wanted to make it available to download for a period of time not to play.

Edited April 27, 2013 by PaulC