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 :-).
One Comment
Nice job, Jylan. Your design is clean and accessible. I’d list the navigation in alphabetical order.
Back to the Hosting, I think we, both, use the same host. They blocked allow_url_fopen as it seems to me. I tried to pull my Twitter content and it failed, but my WordPress installation can still grab the RSS from WordPress servers and from Google blog search. WordPress notifies me if there’s new version available, too. May be WP uses other methods to fetch the RSS.
FreeHostia is good and they offer reasonable free hosting, but I think they disabled the mail() function, but I don’t know if someone can use Gmail as SMTP and IMAP.