Forum Moderators: mack
In a nutshell, I'm new to the game of webmastering. I'm starting to learn CSS so I can get this site up to current standards. But there are other things on my mind that I probably ought to be considering.
#1: This site has two sides, a retail and a wholesale, both on the same server. Right now its a simple thing for anyone to type www.mysite.com/wholesale and enter the wholesale side. Any suggestions to prevent this and only allow authorized access with password control?
#2: Some of my pages are HUGE! The reason, a variety of items on the site use the same drop down list, which contains hundreds of options. One page has this list 7 times. I want to create a single master list and call it on demand from any page that needs it. That will make the list easier to maintain and reduce page sizes. Suggestions how to do this?
#3: Finally (for now) I really don't know much about ASP pages. There must be a reason to use them, because I see them all over the place. Are these more secure, faster loading, prettier?
I'm not seeking step-by-step on how to do anything, just a nudge in the right direction will help.
Thanks for your patience,
grandpa
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#1: This site has two sides, a retail and a wholesale, <snip> Any suggestions to prevent this and only allow authorized access with password control?
Search in here for password control, if your server is on a unix type platform e.g. running apache you could start by using an htaccess password solution. But there are more sophisticated ways to implement such a thing. On Windows servers its another set of commands and software.
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#2: Some of my pages are HUGE!
that is down to your own way of logically structuring the site. Dont forget that it has to make sense to users as well as you. I doubt that you cannot group like types of things and start to break the site into manageable sections. Its worth thinking about with pieces of paper with the computer turned off imho :-) How do you split it up in your offline actitvities?
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#3: Finally (for now) I really don't know much about ASP pages. There must be a reason to use them, because I see them all over the place. Are these more secure, faster loading, prettier?
Asp pages indicate just another of the ways people can get content into the web pages which surfers see.
When you see a page whose name ends in .html or .htm (means Hypertext Markup Language or HTML for short) you have little clue as to how the page was created but only know that it is intended to be interpreted as an html document.
Sometimes by viewing the source of the page "view" "source" in IE you can get an idea of which program was used to create the html page.
Pages which end in .asp or .php or generally where the url includes a? (question mark) in the address you are being given a clue that the pages were created somehow on the server using some scripting or processing.
Usually the page will have been made from taking some contents from a table (database) stored on the server and merged with a template to make it look just like a normal html page and it is in fact being served to you as an html page. The file ending can be sort of understood as an instruction to the server to do extra processing on the file before it sends it to you as an html page. If the page asp or php or whatever were not processed all you would see would be code. (not good)
So you know from the clue in the file ending or the url that a page ending in .asp or .php or various others .. was created perhaps only for your eyes by the server.
Files / pages ending in .asp are usually produced on microsoft servers as ASP is their scripting language for talking to their relational database products which can be installed on the server behind the website. These include Microsoft Access or larger versions (e.g SQL) more powerful than Access.
PHP is an open source scripting language similar in function to ASP, whose presence on pages / servers usually indicates that the server will be a non windows server, perhaps also the database or whatever php is talking to on that server.
The reasons people use databases rather than static pages can be many and varied. I have used up my typing allowance so I cant go there now.
Perhaps someone else will.
Hope that was not too confusing.
For #2 you might do some searches on server side includes (SSI). PHP and Perl are just two ways of "repeating" content from just a single file.
I'm now starting that same process with PHP. There's always something new to learn!
There's some nice light reading in this thread, I think it also links to some good mentionings about page size
40k sweetspot [webmasterworld.com]
