Andy Hamilton wrote:some good points, I am reluctant to use php for the rest of the site as I have heard that it is not as secure and the main reason - whenever I start to mess around using php things go wrong. (as you all are aware
) Not to say that it is not a consideration. I think for now CSS is the way forward as I can use a seperate style sheet for most of the pages and like you say it won't mean rewriting all of the same coding again.
Security really only becomes an issue if you're interacting with things in a way that someone can get in on - for example, if you allow someone to submit a form and then blindly feed that input into a database without checking for naughty attempts to break open your database. If you're just using it for some page layout with no user interaction (other than choosing what page to look at by clicking on links) then there are no problems.
The reason I'd advocate using a bit more scripting behind the scenes is that it allows you to do a little bit more than is possible with plain CSS. For example, your new design has a menu bar at the top of every page. I'm not sure how many pages are on the site but I suspect that a couple of hours in writing some simple functions to top and tail the page and drop in fixed blocks of HTML (like the menus) would easily be covered next time you need to adjust a menu item.
In fact, once you get your design a bit more established, you could send me the HTML (or just point me at the page) and I'll spin some simple code blocks for you.
So should I also keep in the spelling mistakes
Nope! Spulling thengs pruperlee is important for two reasons. First of all, you're unlikely to put people off by spelling everything correctly but you may well lose potential contributers if there are lots of easily corrected errors. It looks like not enough care is taken and casts a poor light on what might otherwise be excellent advice. I recognise that some people find spelling much easier than others but, while there is certainly no call for jumping down people's throats about mistakes, it is good to get things right.
Secondly, if key words are misspelt, we're likely to miss visitors who searched using the correct spelling. It's amazing how many hits you get when you misspell a search term but you tend to get a lot more, higher quality sites when you spell things out more carefully.
You could always include some PHP to mangle spellings at the press of a button for those who like it that way
Wulf
