I am a starving watercolor artist trying to sell paintings, on the web. It’s not going well at all. The problem might be that people want to know their framing costs before clicking the paypal button. Buying them first and then having them framed at a local store is a big deal with unknown costs.

I am hoping to create a table. The center cell of the table will have a predetermined image (The painting.). The rectangle of other cells immediately surrounding the image (representing the mat, and called the mat cells), should have a background color selected by the user in an easy manner.
The user could select by:
• Clicking on a one of a series of links
• Selecting one from a field of radio buttons
• Even clicking an image map would work.
• My preference would be changing the background color by rolling over an array of sample colors, and then clicking that very sample they like, to store the color, and end that part of the selection process,
• Other Ideas are welcome.

Finally, comes the frame. This would be frame images filling the ring of frame cells surrounding the mat cells. The frame images would also be selected by a similar selection process. (That is, hovering over some sample thumbs to display available frames), and clicking the desired thumb.

When they see the finished product and wish to buy it. A form, (I am comfortable here) will submit all of these parameters to paypal, then to me.

There are tons of hover color changing scripts, but I can find nothing which will lock the hover specified data into place.

I know tables and border styles and can even make beveled double and triple mats. I also know a good amount of form handling. It’s the script necessary the present the mats and frames that I need help with.

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After rereading this it seems to me that two fields of radio buttons, 1 for mat color, and 1 for frame style, will do the selection quite well. I know how to pass this information along through a form, but have no clue how to use this information to control the cell backgrounds.

PLease help

I'll give it a shot tomorrow, when I've got more time. How familiar are you with javascript? I would put an image inside each outer cell (with no source attribute initially). Obviously, you have to slice each frame image, so I would create an array to hold each slice. Then I'd build a function that accepted that array as a parameter, and set the source attributes appropriately.

Another way to do it would be with layers, which, if your page layout is compatible with absolute positioning, would probably be easier. You wouldn't even have to slice the frame images. If you could post some images, I could play around with it.

How do you usually process your forms? Could you not supply an 'update' button along with the radio buttons, that would submit the page, the server could then respond with a new page containing the same image with updated border colour and frame graphics, possibly a pricing estimate too. This can be repeated many times until their happy, at which point they click 'submit' or whatever and you send it off to paypal. This is the serverside method, which you can do with the same language you use for form processing. The alternative as Phaedrus says is to use javascript to change the colours around on the clientside before finally submitting. Either method is capable of what you describe.