I've launched a home and garden store, and am in need of some suggestions. I may have some time this month to develop the following site:

http://www.homewareweb.com/

It's an affiliate store, so if you're not into that sort of thing, please don't comment. If you have any comments, please be constructive in them, and I would appreciate it.

hi ,
i think it is nice colors . however the place in the header where 'homewareweb" is written multiple times, seems little small .
and in some pages , the footer is getting misalligned .
otherwise , its a nice implementation ... i was supposed to something like this for a client once , but never got much ahead . is this all your own prgrammming or any available script ?

regards

Thanks for your response,

I agree, I thought the black banner with white logos repeating might be too small, so I'll fix that, and make it more interesting.

About the code, I've learned a lot of PHP on my own, because I had to, and didn't have money for college, and the code is mostly mine. It's taken 6 months to get this far, working weekends and for a few weeks here and there full time.

To start, I borrowed some of the example code that is freely available if you search for "Amazon E-commerce Service" (directly from Amazon web services, not from a third party). It's good to look that over and/or modify it for your own use, if you want to do something for Amazon. It's a very austere start, but if you build from a modified version of theirs, you'll know more of the concepts down the road.

My script requires knowledge of XML and PHP or another scripting language, and SQL. PHP 5 has a the Simple_XML handler that makes parsing XML much easier.

I don't have any scripts available yet, but have been thinking about publishing sometime down the road. Much much later, though.

The reason for that is that I'm still gaining experience, and my code is very disorganized. The admin tools are all used from the UNIX command line, which makes this unsuitable for average use, and the mysql client prompt, and I need to build a better interface before publishing.

Also, since I'm not a college trained coder, I tend to get self conscious about things such as code presentation.

But, since people have expressed an interest, I might start doing the alpha version cleanup and demo late this fall, or when I have some time off.

So far--

Platform:
PHP5.2
Mysql4.3
Apache 2.2.2

The trick is not to request the affiliate products every time they appear on a web page, but to put them into a database, speeding things up considerably.

For regular ecommerce (non-affiliate), since you carry your own products, the only difficult part by comparison is building a shopping cart and linking it to a merchant account and shipping interface.

I have 6 years experience with PHP, but sometimes that seems weak when I run into certain problems.

Hope this helps, sorry if I babbled

Bryce

You have a nice site. But I suggest that you add logo or nice banner for your site. The navigation at the left side of your page is better but you need to include menu or links about your company, services, shopping carts, sitemap and faq about the product. It seems that your site is new, you need to advertise your site online so as to get sales and attract visitor.

i dount an affiliate site like this would need much of a logo so early . But , yes you may surely need to push it for people to visit
its good to hear you made the coding from scratch ( or amazon's base ) .

design ... ok
pictures quality ... ok too
you have 10 mistakes in your source code ...
you should correct them ... it important for searchengines ...W3C

Good luck!