# i made a new site



## handeyman (Oct 21, 2005)

its my first time, im pretty sure the design sucks but id like help with it because i would like to get it popular, i spent a lot of time on the download list, and making the forum, i put the digg.com news feed on the front page, since i check digg like every 5 minutes

oh yeah the site is http://www.techtakeover.com


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## Grove (Jun 21, 2005)

Hey Handeyman,

I like the grey/black layout of the site, I think the top buttons look really good aswell. Good site overall :smile: 

You could make the hyperlinks a big larger if you want. Also, I'd suggest not having a white box around the login area. At the forum the lime/bright green colour with the white text is hard on the eyes. Change the lime to something darker.

To make your site popular you need META = 
or 
make posts in your forums and they will be indexed.

Personally, I don't like the google searches on the sites I make but if it suits your needs, feel free to have it. Apart from that ......

Nice Site !! :grin: 

Have a fun and computing day,
Grove


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## BMR777 (Apr 27, 2005)

I like the design, it's nice. The news feed isn't that great tho because it's part of a nexternal site. Also, on your donwloads section, you should maybe go to a products official URL, such as with MS Antispyware you have it go to MajorGeeks instead of the MS Official DL Page.

Cool Site, but needs a little more content.
BMR777


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## handeyman (Oct 21, 2005)

*thanks for the advice*

il try to look for a better forum skin

il make the hyperlinks bigger on the side

i think im going to keep the search but il take the google logo off

im not sure what a meta tag is, but il work on it, 

about indexing and more posts, well im not sure if this would matter but the forum isnt hosted by my webhost i couldnt figure out how and that way i dont use bandwith, would posting a lot still help even though the forum isnt really techniclly connected to my site

about the download idea the reason i didnt put ms spyware to go the microsofts site is because a lot of people cant pass the genuine check because they have a copy of windows but with site i linked to anyone can download it


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## Grove (Jun 21, 2005)

META Tags are used for promotion. If you had META = Dog anyone who searched on google with the word dog would have your site listed. Probably not on the first page but it will be listed.

Here's a good link that explains it better than me: 

http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/article.php/2167931 

Have a fun and computing day,
Grove


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## tgo (Jul 5, 2005)

Layout looks nice but if you learned some easy php you could take the ridiculous amouht of .htm files you have and convert your whole site (not including forums) into about 2 or 3 pages and have the content in a database. This would make it possible for you to have an admin panel to easily changes pages and now if you change something in your header or footer you have to change ALL those pages instead of just an include file that would affect every page.


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## handeyman (Oct 21, 2005)

tgo said:


> Layout looks nice but if you learned some easy php you could take the ridiculous amouht of .htm files you have and convert your whole site (not including forums) into about 2 or 3 pages and have the content in a database. This would make it possible for you to have an admin panel to easily changes pages and now if you change something in your header or footer you have to change ALL those pages instead of just an include file that would affect every page.



is there a guide for learning that?
and learning databases?
thanks
also can i convert my existing links to php?


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## tgo (Jul 5, 2005)

yes there is plenty places to learn php the first being

www.php.net/manual/en which covers everything. converting your links to php wouldnt do the job it self. It would work like. (I hope i explain this well)

1) You have a header.html which is where you store all the constant stuff at the top of each page such as the links and banner you have.

2) you have a footer.html which is where you store the stuff that goes after the content such as the footer and ending html tags.

3) After that on each page you can do

<?php
include("header.html");


CONTENT

include("footer.html");
?>

and then every page will have a footer and header and if you need to change it you only change it in header.html or footer.html and ever page is affected.

4) For the content part I will use your download pages as a guide since I did something liek this for the site i admin on.

Your stuff here:

http://www.techtakeover.com/downloads.htm

would be converted to somethng like:

http://www.anomalous-security.org/viewlinks.php

and now you see I have those links categories which are dynamic from the database and the links are stored based on the id of the link. And so instead of putting static html like you have the php reads it from the database and outputs that way. this also makes it alot easier for changes. Also you dont forget things like you have web related(3) and there is actually 4 downloads if this was done from a database it would be rendered on each page load and the script would insert the number. (as i have the number of links total and in each category as you have of downloads).

And if you notice the url my whole script runs from links.php not a page for each one. As you see http://www.anomalous-security.org/viewlinks.php?cat=Security Sites pulls all the links from the db that are in that category. so your site could have links.php and downloads.php and thats all you would need to handle all your links and downloads instead of 100 pages like you have now.

If you want to see more of this but to two levels check the articles section.

About the converting your links to php , your site is already done so going back and doing them would be a waste of time but this will help you if you ever desigin another site.

This post was long and I suck at explaining stuff but hopefully it helped.


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