I'd like to learn how to design and maintain a webpage, nothing too fancy, just a site that I can put up pictures of products and have a basic checkout page for credit card payments etc. I'm pretty decent with photoshop which might help a little bit, but I guess my question is, where do I need to go from here? What's the best way for me to learn basic design without having to take classes?

10/17/2006 9:41:27 PM

there are plenty of tutorials and samples online. you can check out http://www.codeproject.com and they will have examples of how to set up a checkout system linked to a database. that'll require visual studio, if you find a csc student, use their msdnaa account to download it for free.

10/17/2006 9:45:16 PM

This may be helpful:

http://www.w3schools.com/

10/17/2006 9:57:00 PM

^nice link, i appreciate it

but i really need to know WHAT to learn first

10/17/2006 10:23:33 PM

Haha, you're way behind then.

You should be able to determine what you need to learn just by shopping online, and thinking about what you're doing/what is going on, and the fundamentals of how a web page is served up to your computer.

You have to have some way to track inventory (like a database), some way to bill someone (secure site with some way to authenticate with credit card companies/banks/Paypal), and once this process is complete, remove an item from the inventory, and notify someone, somewhere that it needs to be shipped out, and a way for a web browser to interface with all these services. There are turnkey solutions for this (Yahoo! has a service I believe, where you just put stuff for sale, and they handle the rest, and Paypal makes it easy too... for a fee). TWW uses ASP to interface with a database, php is another example.

If you haven't gotten this far, try digging around on credit card websites and stuff and search their sites for ways to bill customers with them.

Or pay someone to design the site for you.

10/17/2006 10:38:26 PM

http://www.hotscripts.com/PHP/Scripts_and_Programs/E-Commerce/index.html

10/17/2006 10:47:23 PM

if you don't know what you're doing (i.e. if this is just something to "dick around with"), please don't implement a half-assed credit card charging system. You messing with people's money, and there are too many things that can go wrong if you try to handle credit card transactions yourself.
if you must sell stuff on your site and take payments, set up a paypal merchant account or use a 3rd party CC processing system

10/17/2006 11:00:36 PM

i knew this wasn't going to be easy

10/17/2006 11:27:40 PM

yeah, that's why people get paid good money to create nice websites

10/17/2006 11:31:30 PM

^ding ding.

If you just want to quickly and safely sell stuff online, go get a yahoo store. It's quick and easy

10/17/2006 11:38:32 PM

^^

And to put up with people who want a website but have little or NO idea of what they want it to look like.

10/17/2006 11:42:23 PM

You can use Mambo to manage the website and then integrate E-commerce to handle the store part. It's still not trivial, but you don't have to do any programming(just some FTP/permissions work).

[Edited on October 18, 2006 at 12:09 AM. Reason : e-commerce will let you just redirect to a paypal account, probably the easiest/safest route]

10/18/2006 12:08:49 AM

authorize.net ftw

10/18/2006 12:36:31 PM