What Makes A Good Landing Page?

Embedded from the Pardot Blog

Web Design Help

Just found a really good site that could help me in the upcoming web projects we have. It's called Go Mockingbird and is basically a website that allows you mock up how you want your website to look and you can change bits of it when you want to. Better than using pen and paper as if you want to change stuff it's just a simple click not rubbing everything out or starting again. Click here to check it out.

Company

Haven't posted on here in a while.... Oops, been quite busy trying to design my website which I'm finally happy with, plan to have all the HTML and CSS done by the end of half term, then I can go onto the PHP, MYSQL and jQuery of it all. Should be all ready by the middle of November hopefully so I can test it ready for it's hopeful launch (30th November.) Might even do a Christmas background to give the site a more Christmas feel.

Thinking of different functionalities that I will one day have to add to the site and there's a fair bit. I'm going to need a PHP or jQuery which detects the date, if the date is December 1st - Jan 5th then I want to give it a Christmassy type background, if the date is Feb 1st - Feb 15th it'll have a valentines day theme to the site.

Another functionality I will eventually want to add to the site will be a checkout as guest feature. At the moment I'm unsure how I'd do that so I'll stick to having to register for now. The users won't get spammed with emails but some users don't like the fact that they have to give out information to a site which they may only use one time.

A way I thought up of having people maybe wanting to join up is their final input to site functionality. Should we be wanting to release a new feature to the site but are unsure on what we may put a survey asking what people would like most of all. This should give the users a better feeling of interactivity to the people who run the site.

The company is also going to have several social media platforms that people may contact us on should they wish to, we're planning on using Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Blogger.

Personal Site Redesign

I didn't really like how my site looked when I first designed it so I decided I'd redesign it before I actually launch it. All the back end coding will most probably be the nearly the same but I've done some changes to some of the pages.

This is what the home page of my site is going to look like. The large image at the top of the page is going to be an image slider which will automatically slide to the next image every 10 seconds, there will be 5 images for it to cycle through. The news section will have stories about what is happening, deals that we have or updates that are coming for the site. The 3 images at the bottom will also be on a slider of maybe 10 items. These will be the top selling items that are displayed here. I'm not really focusing as much on the design now and how good it looks I'll build on that as time goes on.

User Experience

This is a video that explains why the user experience is so important to Websites or potentially any other project that you can do. This is a topic I need to learn more about to improve my web design skills and continuously strive to improve upon

Personal Statement

My name is Robert Holland and I am currently a multimedia designer.  I’m highly motivated and passionate about what I enjoy. I’m very determined to succeed in everything I do. I can work very well in a team and can often help in the team with complicated problems that the rest of the team may not understand.

I have always had an interest in why certain objects we use look like they do, and even more of an interest in how the software used in computers, the internet, phones and tablets work and how they are made with particular reference to the coding and science elements contained in the back end rather than the front end.

I am applying for this course because I would like to enhance my current knowledge of computer programming and the science that is contained within the back end such as physics in video games.  I also would like to gain knowledge

 in algorithms that may one day help me when I create my own websites and programmes in the future.

The subject that I am studying at Coleg Gwent, City of Newport Campus has a brief relation to the course I have chosen via the scripting of different programs

for different media.  As my intended career path relates to the course I have chosen I continually strive to improve my knowledge and skill base in these areas.

I already have a small amount of experience in programming as I have been involved in a group project to program a basic social network website plus I have designed and developed my own website which I plan to use as the start up website for when my own business launches. I would like to further develop these skills that I have attained with a better practical approach with I can achieve by studying this course.

My hobbies outside of computers involve gaming, martial arts, running and cycling among many other things. I participate in these sports because they can give you a lot of alone time that leaves you free to generate new ideas and think of things in a different perspective than you normally would. I have also taken part in the 2011 Cardiff Half Marathon and finished with a time of 1:45:00. I also used to participate in martial arts in which I achieved a brown belt.

In the future I wish to become a freelance web designer for a while. Then start up my own companies including my own online shop, a personal software development company and my own social network.

The people that inspire me include Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs among others.  The reason being is that they revolutionised technology and how we use it in our everyday lives and without their innovative thinking this would still be a dream and not a reality.

Solution

Finally solved the problem I was having with my site. For the life of me I couldn't figure out how to make a category and subcategory system so I'm kind of cheating in a way. I decided I'm going to use the URL to help me using the 'GET' method in PHP. Only thing is though SQL injections are possible so I'll have to find a way to fix that. Maybe an if statement like:
if($cat == necklace || $cat == bracelet){
do code;
}
I'll think of something I suppose. It's all falling together slowly should be done in a few weeks.

Interactive Web History Piece

My idea for the interactive web history piece is not to have a time line per say but make the piece like a website. It'll have maybe a Facebook layout and where the news feed should be about uploads, status updates etc. I want to have all the history of the Worldwide Web. I'll post all my workings here when I work on it.

Another idea that I came up with is having a spiral effect timeline maybe like the picture below. I will put prominent points on the spiral of the timeline, then when someone has put the mouse over the point it will show the year and a little box of information about what happened. You can also click on the box to take you to a new page to read more information. Image Location

PayPal For My Website

It's 2:20am and I have college in about 6 and a half hours and I should probably sleep but ehhh, I'll live. Well anyway tonight I've been looking at different payment methods that I can have for my website. At first I was thinking about storing users bank details in one of my databases and then taking the money out manually but then I realised how risky that would be. I may know how to develop a system like that but no-where near to the security standards that would I'd need.

So I decided I would use PayPal to sort out all my problems only I didn't realise how complicated it actually is to set the functionality up on my site. Well saying that all the functionality will be there when I have to add it anyway so it'll just fit into place. But tonight I've been learning how I would set up the IPN payment method and I'm quite looking forward to it. It's going to be a challenge. In a few weeks I get to go and get my business bank account and then I'll be able to set up PayPal.

The good thing about PayPal is that when I create a business account it will automatically set up a book system which will measure all my incomings and outgoings which can make things a lot easier.

Architectual Design

The world is full of people who think outside the box. If it wasn't for these people we would probably still be sat in caves without any technology. Probably not even fire. This is what makes us humans different from many other animals.

Amazing examples of this is some of the architecture that humans come up with. Click Here. In my opinion these buildings are some of the best buildings in the world for what they are. Yet unfortunately they're not very suitable for the population this planet has. If every building looked like one of these building the ammount of time and effort we would have to spend on these buildings would be just too much although then we would be astonished by what we have at the moment as we wouldn't see it much.

My favourite building on this list is the Soundforms shell in London Docklands. The building looks truly amazing and so much time, effort and money has gone into it for the function of enhances classical and orchestral performances.

Game Development

I have been researching how a video game is developed and found this video about how it's all done. This video that I have found shows the theory of what a video game actually is and how to create a game from scratch. It doesn't exactly show the initial ideas of how a game is thought up of but it shows the process of what you can do after you have the initial idea, concept arts, music etc.

Video Research

Warning: Videos may contain strong language.

I was just looking around YouTube for video ideas and research as it looks like we're going to be doing a lot of that this year. I found a video that I really liked and I could possibly use it as research and inspiration. The videos below are animation videos

Here are some more music videos that I really like(kinetic typography). The lyrics on the screen usually have something to do with the song or lyrics at the exact time. It looks that this video may have been done on After Effects.

There are other videos around though that don't keep with the lyrics or what is being said. But towards the end of the video it all makes sense as to what happened. For example the video below. It don't really make sense throughout the video nor even at the end of the video but you get to see what the video is about or why it was made the way it was.

Even the fonts used in some videos and the colour explains what the talking is about or what type of movie it's from. For example the video below is from Full Metal Jacket. All the colours are army colours and even the stars that they used to censor out the word 'f**k' could be considered army stars.

Other videos have animations around the text or by the text that explain what is being said or gives you a visual representation of what is being said on the video. The video below is a perfect example.

Below is the music video that has inspired me the most. The video is called the Johnny Cash Project and is made up from thousands of individual artists drawing one frame of the video each. The video is made from the highest rated frames playing on the frame that they should be played on. For more information Click Here.

Action List For Personal Site

I'm building a site that I hope to be up and running by the end of November and here's the action plan of how the site is coming along right now. It says what I've done, and what I need to do. I'll be updating this post just like my other post showing the image progress of how I'm doing in more detail.

To do list:

Home Page(90% done. Need to connect to database to get items)

Category/Sub-Category(done)

Log In(done)

Register(done)

Item Page(style done no code)

Add Items(admin)(code done)

Remove Items(admin)

Edit Items(admin)

Mass Message(admin)(code done)

Basket/Checkout(disable eCheque)

Edit User Details

Add Story

Edit Story

Pagination(Unsure whether to do 1 | 2 | 3 or infinite so when you get to the bottom of the page it loads more content

Contact Us

About Us

Not Mandatory but will work to get them done eventually:

MVC

CMS

Personal Site Progress

I've spent about a week now working on my website for the end of November. I finally completed it yesterday and tested it out today for bugs but for some reason I wasn't happy with it. I scrapped the whole site and now I'm back to the drawing board. Maybe this time I should take more time and attention to detail of what I'm doing. I'm also making this 100% code no Dream-weaver or any other programmes. Just notepad ++ the way I like it.

This is the initial layout of how the sites going to look I hope. The menus at the top are drop down menus so when you hover over them more options appear to different sub-categories. This time I've structured how I'm going to do everything. Start with the front end stuff how it's all going to end up looking, then when all that is done I'll be working on the back end stuff starting with Javascript(jQuery) and PHP. As this project goes on I'd like to learn a new web programming language such as Ruby, Python or Perl but that'll come at a later date.

Spending the night on how I want my site to look I'm finally happy with the outcome and can move on to other parts of the site. Some bits have changed from my initial idea but that always happens, it's not the first time I've changed it and it won't be the last. This is what the final completed piece should look like with a few changes. Just need some help on some bits though like the footer.

Getting there slowly. This is how I want the product page to look when I'm finished making the site. The pictures at the bottom on the slider is going to be suggested items for the customers based on what they've viewed before. When the site initially launches though that part won't be included because I don't know how to do it yet. There will be better buttons as well for the add to cart.. Maybe I don't know it kind of looks better like that. Not too distracting so you know exactly what it is. The next thing I'm going to add to this under the suggestions box is probably a comment/review system with a 5 star rating. I'll make a programme to receive the amount of each star clicked and get the average from that. That'll be the overall rating of the product. As for the comments I may show the name, date posted and the comment. Eventually add a thumbs up/down and a reply feature to them. Moving on to JavaScript for this soon I hope.

This is my template that I'm using to design the rest of my website. The site is keeping the same layout for nearly most of the site but now I'm stuck as to what to do for the login page. If I just include it in the main content part it'll be too little on one page. I'm thinking maybe having a widget appearing when I click log in so that a box appears under the user links (Register | Login). Ehh I'll keep experimenting and think while doing other things.

Finally got the form field layout done to a point that I'm content with. When it is fully completed the text will be slightly lighter. Next thing I need to add to this form now is JavaScript validation to make sure that all the fields are filled in. I also need to change the property of password when it is clicked but I'm not sure how to go about that. If I set it as type="password" instead of showing Password or Verify Password it would just show me ******** so I need to sort that out. (Ignore the note that was for my friend who's helping me design it)

So this is the look I want to have for the login page. I know it's not what I said it was going to be at first but I think this works better. Only problem I have though is that it looks too empty? I don't want to make the form any bigger because that'll make it look out of proportions. Ehh I don't know I'll think of something I hope. I made the first PHP programme for the site too. The logout button, a simple 3 lines of code. Hoping I can get this site finished by mid October.

Well after doing some experimenting with how I would make the login page look a bit better I decided to see how it with an image on the page. I tried it to the left and right but didn't look right so I decided to put it at the bottom. The image is going to be the company logo. Unless by the time I think of a better way to have the page layout.

I just moved onto JavaScript to do some form validation, then all of a sudden it hit me why I hate JavaScript. Case sensitivity. I can write xmlHttpRequest but nope it won't work for me, it has to be XMLHttpRequest. Ehh roll on working on PHP. Things will then be a lot easier.

Yay! I'm finally getting into the programming part of the site. Form validations, dynamic pages among more things. This should now get a little bit more interesting. First thing I'm going to be working on is user registration, then I'll work on the login system, then the comment and review section of the comments. Then I'll work on the admin systems such as adding, deleting or editing items, as well as the order summary, mass mail feature (to send out) and a mail feature so we can read what people write to us through the site contact us.

So after having a couple of months from programming I finally got back to it and tried to learn JavaScript as well to see how that would go. Unfortunatly looking online there are only limited tutorials for what I wanted to learn so I resorted to using jQuery which I have already got past experience using. I've just completed the registration form to a standard I would be happy to launch with. The reason I had to use PHP and jQuery to do this is so that the page doesn't refresh when sending the data to the database. If I just used PHP it would've refreshed the page which can be quite annoying and time consuming for other people. My aim is to make my site as fast as possible with the knowledge that I have. Eventually I will add data compression to the images so the speed of the site will be even faster. Next I'm going to work on the Log In feature or contact us feature.

Finally got the PHP script working to be able to sign a user in. Although it says in the picture there are only 26 lines of code that I had to do I have to go create another 2 functions to make sure the login system actually worked correctly. Another problem I had was redirecting the user after they have successfully logged in. If I used the PHP header function it would have loaded the page I wanted the user to go to in the status div that should say the errors. To get around this problem I used to JavaScript inside PHP and the user after successfully logging in is redirected to the home page. The top links also change when you're logged in to 'My Account | Log Out'. Eventually there will be 'Cart()' there too with the number of items you have in the brackets.

Probably had the worst day ever today but oh well, my site's coming along slowly. I just finished the add items part and I'm now currently working on the display items part. I found out how it should work I think. I'll put this to the test soon to see how it goes. Probably going to be up working on this now for a few more hours I don't particularly fancy sleeping so I use this to distract myself. Next I think I'll work on the edit items and delete items code, I'll do all the styling (CSS) another day.

I've had a short absence of working on my site but I'm getting back to it now. For this week I think I'm going to spend more attention on the styling of how the site looks. I'm still keeping to the basic layout but spicing it up a bit. This is what I came up. All the gradients are very browser compatible too. But no surprise. IE has some bugs. I'll get onto that soon.

The final layout for my site that I have chosen is that of the image below. It's not a permanent layout but for now it'll be okay. I will add some tweaks before the initial launch to make it look better. Eventually I want there to be no body scrolling for the site, you'll only be able to scroll inside the site. Not sure as to why I want it like this but I like the idea of it. I'll need to improve my CSS for this. I'll get there eventually though.

Future Businesses and Companies to start.

By the end of this academic year I want to start my first ever business to help me generate money. I don't know if this seems too stuck up of me or whatever people want to think but I don't like the idea of working for someone else so I want to start up my own companies.

The first company I want to start up with my friend will be an online shop where people will be able to by clothing accessories and eventually be able to buy clothes from the site also personalise the clothes that they're receiving. The first 5 years of having this company I want the business to stay within the UK so I can gain experience of running and owning a business. After this 5 years of experience I will slowly expand the business so it will be able to go out to the rest of the world.

The second company I wish to start eventually will be a personal IT company creating customized software for people to fit their exact needs of what they want. This company though will require me to have a lot of money to hire people, a lot of experience in how to keep a business going and myself having a lot of computer programming experience. If I was to make this business I think I would have to wait until I was in my 30's.

The last company I want to start that I know of at the moment is a social network. I don't know how or what the social network will provide to keep people coming back to the site but it's just an idea I've got. I was thinking maybe grouping different types of people together just how it is in real life but not sure how I'd go about that...

SWOT Analysis

So I guess I probably should write a SWOT analysis now and be more honest about it and ask other peoples opinions too. This is what I got from myself being more honest and other peoples opinions.

Strengths

Motivated

Good at producing ideas I like

Strong work ethic

Opinionated

Good team member

Able to look at things from more than one point of view

Passionate

Loyal and supportive

Understand complex/complicated concepts that others may not

Thoughtful

Understanding

Very determined to succeed in things I'm good at

Modest

Weaknesses

Easily distracted

Lack of willingness to work on a project if it doesn't interest me

Lazy

Depression

Not very creative

Not very pleased with myself when something's completed. I think I could've done better

Lack of skills

Not a good team leader

Don't like being told what to do

Opportunities

Experience

Learn new skills

Looking at things from all points of view

Study or work in a new country

More money

Overcome my depression

Gain a Bsc

Work for myself or in an environment I would enjoy

Threats

Depression sometimes may get the better of me

Lack of skills

Easily distracted

Not doing what I get told and losing my job

Not being able to think outside the box

Money restrictions to get the newest technology

This was honestly one of the hardest things I've done I've never thought highly of myself, it's just me so I had to include 'modest' in the list. Not sure whether or not it's really a strength or weakness so I put it in 'Strengths' unless someone says otherwise

But to make it more personal if anyone can think of any of my strengths or weaknesses comment below please? Thank you.

Contradicted myself?

On a previous blog I talked about predicting the future for technology. Well I've now just watched a video which is predicting the next 5,000 days of the web. So far we're in the third stage he's on about.

After watching the whole video though I think Kevin may have predicted too LITTLE in this amount of time. The web is already becoming a part of us with physical objects now. For example the Blackberry code thing. You scan it, then it connects to the internet to let you know what it is. The speed of which the internet is growing is just too much to take. Will it ever stop growing? What's the next stage after web 4.0(Internet being physical)?

The internet

The internet is amazing. The amount of content that is on the internet is just unbelievable and utterly amazing. But the thing is we're not amazed?

Even more amazing is the physical internet. The bits that we don't see but without it won't work. In the oceans there are cables thousands of miles long sitting on the ocean floor to keep the world connected with the internet. I'll put a video below this of how it all works but wow. Just really interesting how it all works. I thought the internet worked by sending a signal to a space satellite and that comes back to where you want it to go. How wrong was I?

Future Predictions.

So I've often wondered what everything we know will be like in 10 - 20 years time? If I could travel in time now and go to the year 2027 would I recognise what I see around me? I guess in a way I'm lucky that I was born when I was born because all I've known is how to adapt to different technology. In the 21st century technology has evolved so much people who aren't used to this quick I change might get left behind.

It's amazing though how people predict things for dates and when that date comes nothing really happens. For example in 2005 Ray Kurzweil believed that:

"By 2010 computers will disappear. They’ll be so small, they’ll be embedded in our clothing, in our environment. Images will be written directly to our retina, providing full-immersion virtual reality, augmented real reality. We’ll be interacting with virtual personalities."

How wrong was he? We're nowhere near that but he's a person that is very smart with technology and the future of how technology may turn out. Just goes to show no-one can truly predict the future.

Misuse of technology.

Personally, I believe that the technology that we have today is so misused by the consumers because they simply don't understand the power of the device that they actually have. For example in 1969 NASA managed to send man up to the moon. The computer that they used was one of the best of its time. The mission had a 2.048 MHz CPU computer. We can now find calculators that have better CPU than this

The first the first generation iPhone had 620MHz(which got under clocked to about 412MHz.) And the CPU in the iPhones gradually increased to 600MHz for the iPhone 3G S and 800MHz for the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4 S. So why is it with this increased amount of power that we have in all of our devices this technology is so poorly used?

By saying poorly used I mean not many people actually pay attention to what they have and what it can do, I done a bit of research earlier for the most popular iPhone apps and the top 5 were:

1. Angry Birds
2. Fruit Ninja
3. Doodle Jump
4. Cut the Rope
5. Angry Birds Seasons

So why is it that with all this power we have now in our daily lives do we prefer to throw birds at bricks with pigs in the middle? It beggars believe I find although that could be a person trait that's just me but still. Also the amount of money people spend on phones too. I asked some people the other day: "What do you use your phone for?" the response I got really proves my point that people don't realise the technology that they have on them, they simply replied with:"To ring and text people." If you want to ring and text you can buy a phone for about £30 like myself then you won't be wasting money that you don't have for something that you can't use properly.

That though is just mobile devices that are being misused it happens with nearly device that you can work on. For example I know someone who spent about £1,000 on a Mac, I asked him what he actually does with the Mac he told me he browses the internet and occasionally writes essays on there when he has coursework due. But why, why spend that much on a Mac when that's all you're going to do? You could spend a quarter of that amount on a normal PC and still do exactly the same as you do at home.

Electronic companies aren't making this misuse of technology any better though. If anything they're pushing it so they can earn themselves more money. Every year electronic companies are bringing out items that are faster than their last item they bought out. Then the next year do the same again and again. I suppose this isn't such a bad idea but if a computer company at this very moment said: "We're going to stop making new machines for 4 years, we're only going to sell machines that we've already released." In 4 years time the computer would run at an average speed. This is because the software doesn't have a big enough impact on the machines as of yet. The machines are allowing themselves to run a million things at once when no-one actually does it. My friend for example has a computer and he's a gamer, he can play WoW, Skyrim and another game of his choice all at the same time if he wanted to and his computer would still run. His computer isn't even customized just bought it off the shelf.

Electronic companies should actually make every device personal. People should be able to go to the shop and explain why they want the device and what they'll be using the device for. This way technology won't be as misused, earths materials won't be continuously wasted even more than it already is and people will be able to safe a lot of money this way.

Although I've just done a massive post about people who misuse technology. There are still the people who understand the technology and know how to use it to it's fullest potential. I was speaking to someone the other day who worked on the movie 'Avatar' and was told that the computer that he uses to work on the movie cost him £35,000. I was quite taken back by this but also had some hope. Not everyone misuses the technology that they have in front of them, but unfortunately the vast majority of people do.

Creative Course

This has to be one of the main reasons I chose to do a creative course. As he says if you do something different you're sat there doing things that everyone else has done for the last however many years and will do for the next however many years.

Annoying ads..

I dream of a day with I can have a few different tabs open on my Mozilla or any browser and not jump a mile when an ad with sounds starts playing. Annoying that you have to scramble through every tab to find the ad to shut it up. Maybe a future browser option? Disable video adverts.

Timeline/Action plan for my life

So today I was walking round just randomly thinking about anything then it suddenly hit me, I don't really have any goals that I really want to live up to, or if I do I don't really know what they are because I simply haven't remembered them. This got me quite scared really and I don't know why, but I decided to make myself a timeline/action plan for the future of my life so I have goals that I can live up to, maybe in a few days/weeks/months there will be a lot more goals.

Action Plan for my learning on Dipity.

Internet Explorer should just stop existing...

So for the last 2-3 hours I've been trying to get a page for my website to look the same in all browsers. I got it to look exactly how it should look in all browsers except IE... Finally get it to look how it should on IE then it goes and messes up in Mozilla! IE really should just die out already. Hopefully it will soon mind. The percentage of users is slowly dropping from 20.1% in January to 16.2% in August.. IE death is coming for you and only you!

To fix this I might just make a browser detection function for my website so if it detects someone going to the site who is using IE it will redirect them to a page saying "Why you no use good stuff?" Ehh maybe not but I might make it so it redirects to a page saying "This site is currently under maintenance for IE. Please use another browser."

Saying all this bad stuff about IE though it does have some uses so it's not all bad. I mean if it wasn't for IE how else would you download Mozilla, Chrome, Opera, Safari or whatever you use when you first get your computer and it don't have those on there.

Wow I love that I have a rant about IE being a load of rubbish, go onto the Daily Mail website and a headline I see "Microsoft admits bug that leaves 'hundreds of millions' of Internet Explorer browser users vulnerable to hackers...." Well if I ever had the urge to use IE again I definitely don't now.... Click here for the article.

Smart MP3/iPod

So I went out for long run earlier (about 14 miles) and took music along with me as you do. How ever while running I noticed that some songs would come on and it would make my heart rate go up higher (probably because it was a fast song it made me pick up speed)

So this got me thinking one day maybe it'll be possible to have a smart MP3 player/iPod whichever you want which can check your heart rate during exercise then search through the songs it has to give you the best songs for that heart rate. So maybe if you're not pushing hard enough it'll put on a song that will make you get up to that point

Meh, I don't know just an idea really... Bed calls soon

Difficulty building my website

So I'm building a website that I'm going to be able to use at the end of November to start up my business but I've ran into some problems.... Well not really problems just making things a lot more complicated for myself but at the moment I honestly can't think of any other way that I can do what I want to other than this way.

So I have a website with a navigation bar at the top of the page for example Home, Contact Us, About Us, Videos etc. You should get the idea. So say you are on 'Home' the tab for you to be able to click home should already be highlighted so you know where on the page you are.

To do this I made a function that I included on every page called 'links()'. On the index page (Home page) it should be 'links(0)', on the Contact Us page it should be links(1) etc. I got it to work but it's way to complicated.

The way I managed to get this to work was make a function in my multi_page.php file called links ($x) and in this function I had a switch statement that looks like:

switch($x){
case 0:
$home = 'style="background-color:#eee9e9;text-shadow:1px 1px 3px black;"';
break;

case 1:
$contact= 'style="background-color:#eee9e9;color:#303030;text-shadow:1px 1px 3px black;"';
break;

case 2:
$about= 'style="background-color:#eee9e9;text-shadow:1px 1px 3px black;"';
break;

}

The problem with this though is eventually if the site has more and more different tabs and I decide to change something I will have to go through every individual line in the switch statement to change the code. Does anyone have any idea how I can make this easier?

University and Business

Ehhh so just looking for universities I want to go to at the end of this college year. Looks like I got a lot of work to do as the lowest I can possibly get is a Distinction, Merit, Merit. Busy year a head. Hopefully it'll be worth it though.

Should I fail to get into university next year I have a backup option which is going to be to focus more on my business that I'm going to start at the end of November. When my business first starts I want it to stay within the UK for the first 5 years just so I can get a feel for how it's all going to work. After 5 years I will then want to move my business to sell to the rest of Europe, with time it will eventually move to Asia, America, Africa and the rest of the world.

Still fneh... Uni shouldn't be this difficult to get into especially seeing as we're paying them ridiculous amounts of money for them to teach us.

Game Idea... Maybe?

So I think I came up with an idea for a game. I want a horror game that for the first few levels will profile exactly how you play and learn more about you and who you are. After the game has this knowledge about you it will customise itself to be as scary as it can be with the way you play. Also if you stop playing the game and someone takes over it will realise that a new player is playing and change the knowledge that it has on you to gain knowledge about the next person who would be playing. Although it would not know that a player has changed it will sense a change in the way that the game is played.
Eventually to the game I would like to add a webcam feature to the game that will monitor your face and body for anticipation. When the webcam senses you are at your calmest something may or may not happen depending on the way you play the game.
To stop people from faking the webcam experience with a computer program there will have to be a program detection within the game that will detect when a program is being used with the webcam at the same time.
To create a game like this I will need to have a good understanding of the psychology of fear and anticipation to make the game the best experience it could possibly be for you. The game would have to have an intelligent agent feature so that it can keep learning about you which will probably take the most time.
When and if I create the prototype of this game my focus will not be completely on the graphics of the game but more on the intelligence that the game will have. Although if this became a mainstream game it would need constant maintenance as fears and anticipation could be ever changing and people might be able to find a way to get around the system so it must be as secure an experience it can possibly be.