Hi all. I work in field service engineering and am mostly a hardware guy with good windows skill and a little in linux, no experience of ASP or PHP.

I registered a domain with webspace2me for £2 for 2 years, with £25 paid to some geneva based company, that I should get back when I become verified. This website is for selling books, and the host advertised a merchant account facility and shopping cart, so I jumped in. The £25 was slightly hidden in a second user agreement that could only be read if you mistyped your credit card details or your password the first time, by clicking on an attachment.

Told that the domain would be registered within 24 - 48 hrs on receipt. Cool so far, though my URL still appears available when checked. As long as the £25.00 gets returned and I get my URL, I'm happy not too bothered about the service so long as their webserver is up most of the time. Used to DIY anyway.

Anyway. The advice I need is on where to get started. The host offered ASP, PHP and MySQL, but only a vague idea of how to use those. I take it I just download the program, learn the scripting language and connect it to the URL. It all seems to be open source so i can experiment.

Sorry a bit lost at them moment. Only ever had one website before, it came with dreamveaver or something and was really user friendly compared to my understanding of PHP. Also that site was just for hosting http downloads and did not include stuff like taking credit card payment and shopping baskets.

Thought this would be a one day project:, in a house with over 5 million books dating back to 14th century, need space for desktops and servers. Not paying ebay £20 a month for a online store, hence want to advertise them on my own site. Thanks in advance for any advice.

I'm not entirely sure what advice you're looking for. The only question I see is about what the host offered. If they offer asp, php, and mysql that means they have it installed on their server. The only thing you need to do is learn how to use the languages.. There's no program to download.

I'm not sure at all if there's a question in there about the domain, but if there is let me know and I'll do what I can to answer it.

it seems that you want a site and are prepared to learn the langauge but if your not then i would suggest making another post asking for a php coder and then paying them a bit of money and then you just sit back and relax :P

best tip

learn true html and php

then use wysiwyg web builder

its incredibly easy

and having html and php knowledge makes it even easier when you need to use it!

What you is what you get editors in most cases don't give you very good markup. I suggest coding by hand. Even dreamweaver allows you to type it all out. It may not be as quick as an WYSIWYG edtor but the code is cleaner and leaner.

Learning php can be a good step, but there are also plenty of third party open source scripts out there that can do exactly what you need and then some, it just takes a little looking around. Hotscripts.com can be your friend.

Hi. Thanks for your replies. I have the doain now. Before I get to designing the website. I need to know how to access the site. If I type the URL into a web brouser, I get directory listing is dennied error message.

So for now, just want to know how to log in to the website as administrator. I have a username and password, but no instructions on how to log in from the host.

Well, that's the website so far but it has no pages created yet. You need to create an index.html or default.asp page and put it there. The host should have all the login information and instructions. Basically you'll need an FTP address, username and password. Then using an FTP client you can use that info to access and upload pges.

create a page & upload it to the ftp

how are you getting on helios

You should have been given information with your username and password.

Depending on your service provider it depends on what you have.

Here are a few examples of the web-based access:

http://www.your-domain.com/cpanel
http://www.your-domain.com/vdeck
http://www.your-domain.com:8020

If you just need to upload files you need to get an FTP program, (there are several free out there).

You'll plug in your server name, your username and password in the given fields and then connect. Then upload your files.

You will need the web based control panel in most cases to set up any databases you might need, as I doubt the mysql applications will work on a service provide server, at least I've never found one that I can use them with.

You also need to know the platform of the server whre you account is being hosted, some times it can support both PHP and ASP but its limited as its not a specific platform, or if its a PHP with ASP support your asp support will be limited.. this is random but its only FYI

Helios,

I was wondering whether or not you had a copy of the terms and conditions that were required to sign up for Credit Geneva as they are now not available on the website!

Thanks,