Just yesterday I launched a website for the new Yeppoon Central shopping centre at yeppooncentral.net.au. Just to be clear, I wasn’t hired or paid to build this by the Centre management, instead I have a plan to make money off it myself. I’m not going to tell any details on this blog though.
The design is fairly simple, just a two column type using negative margins to line up the sidebar and content sections. Screenshot below:
At the moment the shop pages only have a description of the shop, contact details, and the latest news (taken from the Google News RSS feed). I used the LastRSS PHP class to do the work of pulling in the feed and then I wrote some preg_replace rules to clean it up. I do have some more features planned however, maybe a ratings/comments system on the shop pages.
Hosting was a bit of trouble. I normally use free hosts (paid hosts are just a bit too expensive for me at the moment), and the host which I use for this website, Yeppoon Info and briter:webdesign doesn’t allow the PHP method used to grab the feeds, which I think is fopen. Instead I had to go looking for a free host that supports this method. Eventually I found freehostia.com, which seems to be a very fast host just right for my needs.
Anyway please go over and have a look yourself at the Yeppoon Central website: yeppooncentral.net.au. And yes I am trying to get some nice links for Google
.























