Please don't forget one of my favorites,, <a href="http://www.coffeecup.com/firestarter/">FireStarter</a>

Thanks Zipper - i know the Murray very well. I've spent many days along it SA banks and remember fondly some great fishing and yabbying expeditions.

Thank you too Jo Ann for your kind words of welcome. Your explanation of the shopping cart software helped a lot - maybe i should wait until the pro version of Creator is released - if it is not too far away?
I have built a site using VSD and would like to link to a shopping cart which has the same layout as my site pages. If I understand you correctly I need both Creator and Designer?

I checked out Firestarter Dave and can see the benefits of it - it is on my 'list of things to purchase'.

Hiya Tony,

One thing that might be an issue is trying to match up the themes between your external and shop setup, but I would suggest the Shopping Cart Designer "Pro" version for the designer as you can do a whole lot more with it than the basic version. You are able to setup a shop using the basic version of the Shopping Cart "Creator" at any time and upgrade it when the "Pro" version is released as they will be very compatible. This might give you time to get your theme situation setup for the most part as although there will be Designer changes in the software as well, they will be pretty compatible to any theme you create now with some nice additions that you can add later. Either way good luck on it all

Hello, I'm Albert and like to introduce myself.

After a couple of months staying in this forums, I finally wrote this short text about who I am.
The reason why I didn't earlier is because I have to write in English and this is not so easy for me.

My arrival in this world gave double joy and happiness to my parents: worldwar II (1945) just ended and I brought new live in the family. Kortessem, a small village in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, got one habitant more! But not for a long time; six years later (1951) we moved to a neighbour village: Diepenbeek.
After primary school and 3 years of technical secondary school, I became an electrician and at the age of 16 my real live started working and learning.
The meaning of 'working' for me was to hire myself out for the needed time to earn my living (and later on the living of my family) but meanwhile to keep some time for studying and joying my (our) life.
While I was working, I saw new technics and things I didn't know anything about, so I went to eveningschool, (socio-culturaj) education centres, correspondence courses, courses offered by my employers, etc.
I've always, and still do, like to learn about different things. As much as possible I've tried to change my job everytime I learned about new objects of study.
Some people call it "A dozen trades, thirteen miseries", but for me it has been "thirteen times happiness"!
I have had a lot of fine jobs: paper making, electronica, quality inspector, measurement and control technician and finally (about 1980) I started playing and working with computers, in 1990 I became responsible for a small local network (server and workstations: Windows NT4 and common Office products and some special applications).
I always kept the Peters Principle in mind, so I've never had the need to make a big career, I just tried to keep it interesting and joying my live.
I was NOT married to my work but yes I am married with my dear wife, we have two children and two grandchildren.
From the time I got retired after 44 years of working, in 2002 I became a volunteer in our "senior center", where I teach some computercourses and bridge to people of the age of 50+.
So I thought a nice website for them would be very useful. Therefore I've bought this year on the 28th of June the CoffeeCup Web Designer Pack and began a whole new adventure: building a smal website.
Last weekend, my first website build with CoffeeCup HTML editor 2010 went online.
All the code is written in the editor (except for two Javascripts I've found on the Internet), I did not use the Visual Editor.

I know, it is far from professional, but it works and I've had a lot of fun.

If you like to see it, this is the link:

http://www.fonteintje-diepenbeek.be

Everything is written in Dutch, because it is our mothertongue.

(I hope this text in English is somewhat readable as well)

Hi Albert. The site looks very professional to me.

Thanks, Tom.

Albert
Your site looks great, I too work with seniors at our center and teach a beginning computer class as well as designing websites for non-profits using Coffee Cup programs. I created a website for my "students" which contains links to notable sites and "freeware" and "shareware" they can download and install.

If you are interested I will share the link! One question I really like your calendar and wonder what program or script you used to create it?

Cayucostom

Thank you Tom!

You are free to use a link, but all of my public is Dutch-speaking and so is all the text on the website.

For your information about the software I used for the "ready to use" Forum, Webagenda and Photogallery", it is all free software, written in php. That is also the reason why I'am now interested to learn some about php.

- Webagenda : http://www.k5n.us/webcalendar.php
- Simple Machines Forum : http://www.simplemachines.org/
- Coppermine Photo Gallery : http://coppermine-gallery.net/

They are all very easy to install. With them I took my first steps to the web, without any knowledge of php. Just playing a bit around with some colors (thank you CoffeeCup Colorschemer ) to adapt the look a bit to the oficial colors of our Community.
But building something all by myself from scratch and the help of CoffeeCup Editor gives much more satisfaction.

My next website will be one in php with mysql database (I hope), but there is still a lot to learn.
With the help of the specialists from this forum it would certainly be possible.

PS. At the end of the year I'm planning to give an easy beginners course about "Building an easy site by your own" for the seniors in our Community. By taking notes during building this site from scratch with the CC Editor, the text of my course is ready and I can use the free version to begin with.

I wrote also a letter to "CoffeeCup Educational Software Package" to ask if it also could be used to teach retired people, but they did not answer me. I hoped at least to get a "yes" or "no" but I got no reaction.

Hiya Albert,

Very nice site and a great thing you're doing for your community. I do have a suggestion though that should help your site load a little faster on some of your pages.

Thumbnail images need to actually be thumbnails instead of the full size images being pushed into a small space. Hopefully that makes sense. Right now your thumbnails are actually referencing the full size image so every time a page with smaller images with links is loaded it's very slow because it's actually loading the full size images not a small thumbnail.

The way to do this would be to take the images, resize them in an image editor or you can use something like EZThumb by Fookes http://www.fookes.com/ezthumbs/ which works awesome to make mass (lots at a time) thumbnail images for you and renames them for you if you tell it to and so on.

Once you have those images created, use those in place of the small images, say like those on this page and any that are like it:
http://www.fonteintje-diepenbeek.be/e-m … chief.html
the monthly image for each month on this page

You already have a link on those images to open the PDF or other pages so you should be ok there, just need to replace the image and it's width and height settings.

This should make your pages load a lot faster as they won't be having to load, in this case 12, full size screen shot type images, it will instead load images that can be created to be the size you have right on the site now. Not sure what your image size area is on your table, but whatever it is just create the thumbnail images to be around that same size and you won't have to change much just add the size code

Hello Jo Ann,

Thank you for your good advice!

I've downloaded EZThumb and it works very fine indeed. Only a few pictures with transparant background lost their transparancy, even in a .png- picture?. Then I've used for those pictures another utility: "Faststone Photo Resizer" : http://www.faststone.org/ and this one kept the transparancy in my .png-pictures.

********

Albert