Plans for visiting the shops again

The first time I went to Hull to visit the shops, I visited Bogoh Boutique and Polly Anna. Since then I have also emailed a couple of other shops on Newland Avenue and I have had replies saying they are interested in having their products on my website and that they think my website is a good idea and could help their business. However, both Boutique Bogoh and Polly Anna have not emailed me back so I am planning on going to visit them again this Friday afternoon along with my designs and some information about the website and how it will work so I can show them this so they have a better idea of the project I am doing. Then if they are still interested after I have shown them this, I will arrange a date and time of when I can go back to the shops and take some photographs of the products they would like to be on website.

This is the only way I can think of to get an answer from these shops and then I will know which shops are interested and which shops aren't so I know which ones I need to mention on my website and which ones I need to visit again for photographs.

New upload form for thumbnail images

I have followed another tutorial for an upload form so the user can input a product name, product description and a product image (which I have done already) but this one also saves a thumbnail image of the uploaded image as well as the full image. The only problem I had with this tutorial is when I had uploaded an image, I looked at the thumbnail I had created and it was square so the top and the bottom of the image was missing. I knew there was somewhere within the php code that I could change to make the size of the thumbnail that was being created. The bit of code that I needed to change was:

$thumb_width = 150;
$thumb_height = 150;













This was the original size so I just changed the width to 120 and kept the height the same so the thumbnail wasn't too big to be a thumbnail so in the php code I now have:

$thumb_width = 120;
$thumb_height = 150;

This was something really simple and easy to do but I did not know this before so I have now learnt how to do this.

HTML, CSS & Search Box

Today I started the html and css for the women's design for the site. I haven't done much so far as I wanted some feedback on my design before I coded it all up but I have got the current layout of the home page done and put the search box in the navigation bar and it works so if the user inputs their keyword, it will take them to the results page where it will display any matching results. The tutorial I did for the search box made it so when the user typed in their keyword, the results were displayed on the same page. I did not want the search results to appear on the home page or whatever other page the user may be on when they type something in the search box so I needed to figure out how to take them to a different web page and display the results.

(to complete)

Men's Design Struggle!

For my website I am going to have two different designs. One for women that are buying gifts for women so this will be cute and girly and then I am going to have a second design for the men that use the website that are buying gifts for women. I completed the design for the women's side of the site quite a while ago now and I found this quite easy to do but I am finding it difficult to come up with a design for the men's side of the website so I have decided to look at other websites that are aimed at a male audience to see what the designs are like and what colours are popular etc. The websites I have looked at are:

http://www.red5.co.uk/
www.topgear.com/uk
http://www.burton.co.uk/
http://www.mensfitness.co.uk/
http://www.firebox.com/
http://www.skysports.com/

Most of these websites have designs aimed at men and content aimed at men but I chose to look at red5 and firebox because they sell products for women as well as men but the overall look of these sites looks to be more aimed at men. This is helpful because I want my design to be aimed at men but the products on the site will be for women.

From looking at all these sites I can clearly see that the most popular colours on websites aimed at males are black, grey, red and white. Also they all have a large main image on their homepage so again this helps me as I can try to include this into my design.

Updated Search

I have already created a search box where the user can enter keywords and then the results page will return any results that are appropriate. I had originally had the product name, product description and the shop name returned to the user but I thought an image of the product is quite useful so now I have changed the code so an image is also returned on the search results page and this is how it would look if the user searched for 'chocolate':

Product Details & Image Upload Form

I have previously created a product details form that just uploaded information about products and I created an upload image form which uploaded the image to my images folder but I couldn't figure out how to get the image url to automatically store into my database. I have now put everything into one form and taken and the shop name and shop address out of the form because the user will need to log into the site anyway to access this form so we will know who has logged in and I have also managed to get the image upload so it stored correctly in my database. Below are some screenshots of how it looks and works:


Above is the form the user enters the data into.

Above shows the user choosing an image to upload.

Above is the form with the user input showing.

Above is showing the image/ product has been added.

Above shows the uploaded image in the 'images' folder on my site.

Above shows the image that has been uploaded.

Above is a screenshot to show the product the user typed in has been inserted into the database.

Product Details Form

I have created a product upload form which asks the user for the new product name, product description, shop name and shop address. Below there is a screenshot of what the form looks like:
Once the user has clicked the 'submit' button it takes them to the following page:

Below is a screenshot of the products table in PHPMyAdmin to show that the last product entered into the table through the form was the bath fizzers and that product is there so we know the form has form has successfully added the correct data into the table.