Excellent Cheap Stock Images

A common problem I found when looking for good quality stock photos for use on a website was that nearly every website I used was so expensive, some photos being in the hundreds of dollars or pounds.

That was unitl I came across this handy website called http://www.123rf.com/, prices for a stock photo to be used on the web are just £0.60 which is roughly just over $1.20.

I have sourced some fantastic images from here which are used on professional websites across the internet.

Post your comments if you know of any other cheap stock photo websites or even free ones.

For cheap web design and web development, please visit my cheap website design website.

Asp.Net 2.0 CSS Adapters

If you haven't already checked out the cool new Adapters in Asp.Net 2.0 and are keen to have your website return valid XHTML code even from the built in Asp.Net 2.0 web controls then Adapters are definelty worth checking out.

I recently used an Asp.Net 2.0 Adapter on a simple website I created which used the web control, this menu returned x amount of menu objects from an XML file containing multiple levels of sub-menus returned from a database (I will cover how I done this in a future blog), you can find the website here (Finley Refurbishments)

The Menu control normally returns a big mess of table controls in your HTML output which to be fair looks pretty messy if you have already created a nice CSS template, with the new Adapters the Menu control returns very simlple XHTML such as:

• Homepage


• Services

For more information about Adapters you can visit a very informative website here:
Creating CSS Friendly Websites with Asp.Net 2.0 Adapters

My web development experience

I have been developing web sites since the age of 14 which was 11 years ago, I am completely self taught and have a vast knowledge of mulitple programming languages including:

• Asp
• Asp.Net (C# & VB.net)
• CSS
• HTML / XHTML
• Javascript
• DHTML
• Ajax
• T-SQL

I have also programmed Assembly, C++ and many more programming languages for many different scenarios.

I started my professional career at just 17 years old as a junior web developer for a company called Fox Online based in Birmingham, United Kingdom where I gained a good understanding of good programming practaces.

After my time at Fox Online I had the knowledge and expertise to move on to a multi-million pound online dating business called Dating Direct who were and still are the largest singles dating website in the United Kingdom (they have now merged with meetic.com). I was responsible for many key web development tasks for this very busy dating website.

After 2.5 years of working for Dating Direct and gaining some very good knowledge in not just Programming but also marketing, graphic design and many other key aspects a successfull website needs I decided to move on. I currently now run my own web design service for small local businesses called UK Creative Designs, I offer professional websites rates as low as £199.99 which has become very sucessfull in my local area.

If you or your business would like a professional cheap website then please visit my website for more information.

Asp.Net 2.0 Bitwise Operators

This is my first post on my blog so please be gentle with me if I make any mistakes...

My first post is about a handy way of storing multiple checkbox values into a single field using bitwise or enum values.

For example, lets say you have a web form with a multiple choice of checkboxes, it would take a long time and not be very scalable if you had a fi

eld / row in a database for each selection the user makes.

Instead, you can assign each interest a binary value starting from 1, for example:

Asp.Net = 1
C# = 2
C++ = 4
Java = 8
Javascript = 16
VB.Net = 32

You can have as many as you like as long as you double the value each time.

When the user submits the form you can simply perform the following action to return the total of all the selected binary values:

Dim interests As Integer
For i As Integer = 0 To chk.Items.Count - 1
If chk.items(i).Selected Then
interest += chk.Items(i).Value
End If
Next

You can then store this single value into your database as an integer along with any other details the user has entered.

When editing this record you can use the AND operator to check if the value was selected like so:

Dim interests As Integer
'-- you need to return the interests value from your database here.

For i As Integer = 0 To chkItems.Items.Count - 1
If (chkItems.Items(i).Value AND interests) = chkItems.Items(i).Value Then
chkItems.Items(i).Selected = True
End If
Next

This compares the binary value against your interests binary value, if a match is found then it will tick the checkbox.

Any questions or comments about my very first post are welcome, that includes criticism (I know it's not the greatest post ever but i'm impatient)