background music that is controllable -sound on/off

[roydy]

Hi, I'm new to the forum, so hello you helpful people!

I've just started out doing a bit of web design and I am realy enjoying it, done a couple now and just finished my own, steveackroyd.com if you fancy a gander, all comments most welcome. Just remember its only the fourth one i've ever done!

Its a personal site and I want to add some background music. I know this is a dubious decision as a lot of people find it irritating. I am looking at doing a few sites for the service industry however and someone has asked me is I would be able to do this so I want to try it out on my own site first. I can embed sound so it plays when the first page loads without any ugly music controls but then when you click to change to a new page the music starts from the begining again rather than carrying on - Very irritating! and theres no way of turning it off.

What I want is to include a music file that will play beats in the background softly and that will continue whatever page you move to on my site. I also want to include a small sound on/off button somewhere so that users have the option of muting it. I will just have one track that will loop. Will I be able to do this in dreamweaver? or is is some kind of flash plugin layer thingy that i need? the dreamweaver help instructions don't realy give me the answers i need so its down to you clever kids!

Cheers

Roydy

 

[TamedTech]

Welcome Roydy,

First things first... cool Name!

Secondly ... Nice work on your site, whenever I spot some new to web design posting their link I usualy grimice in the same way i do when looking at my early sites, but was pleasatly suprised to see a well thought out and attractive site, well done.

Now, there is a hole load of stuff i can post here for you as you're getting started in the industry, lots of helpfull tips and links.

Now, i notice on your site you've ventured slightly into the world of CSS to style your site, which is a great start, however, it can be so much more, CSS can be used along with <Div> container tags to completely style a site.

Take a look at

http://www.csszengarden.com

for some examples, look down the right hand side for the 'show all' link or somthing similar, you'll find about 1000 excelent site layouts, and they all use the exact same HTML code, just a different CSS style sheet, amazing how different you can make them look.

At the moment you use <tables> to organise your content, and it works great, but in threory and best practice, you should be using <tables> to organise tabular data.

Many people still use tables to organise layout, but after moving over to CSS a while back i can only plug its benefits, it'll make life alot easier.

Next up is what we call 'valid markup', basicly a good site should always follow strict rules set by the W3C standards, and you can check your site against thier validator to see how it goes. Your site isnt too bad, you've just missed a couple of Alt attributes for your images, see it here.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.steveackroyd.com

Take a look around

http://validator.w3.org

for more stanards information and tutorials on that kind of thing.

Next up, if you're really looking to get into web development full time, then it will really pay to look into learning a Server Side language, which will allow you to build sites with dynamic content that comes from a database, a step up from dynamic sites is Web Applications which is a higher level of server side coding, but its all a mater of how much you want to sink your teeth in.

I started doing the odd job about 18 months ago with small static sites, and now i'm fully submerged in application development, and love every minute of it.

For server side solutions there are tons, ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, JSP, ColdFusion and a whole load more, each with its benefits.

I'm into ColdFusion myself, its a technology from Adobe/Macromedia who no doubt you're familiar with, take a look a these sites for ColdFusion.

http://www.easycfm.com

- Tutorials galor on this puppy.

http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion

http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/demos/

Those will be a whole load of information on the latest release of coldfusion, you'll love the similicty of what are usualy complicated tasks, such as flash forms, PDF creation and all sorts.

OK, well, thats enough of that.

Now, to answer your question about the music, i would suggest using a small Flash Based applet, have search around the net, there are thousands of Flash Music Players which will probably suite your needs.

The benefit being that 98% of systems have flash installed and will support it.

The other option would probably be somthing using JavaScript, which admitadly i dont know much about, but again, a google will turn up results, the downside of going JavaScript is that its not that easy to code, and its also not as widely supported as flash.

Hope that helps buddy, welcome to the boards,

Rob

 

[roydy]

Hey Rob,

Many thanks for the indepth reply and nice comments! I'll have a looksee at those links because often the thing i've been trying to get to work for so long by myself is a very simple fix, its just knowing where to look for the answers!

It would appear the flash based applet is what i'm after and i obviously need to do a bit more reading as to get it integrated into my site. The problem with teaching myself is that I often do things the wrong way around, even though they work, so it may take me a while!

On a bit of a tangent, are most people out there self taught at web design or have you guys been taught at collage or uni or the like? Also I don't realy know how much to ask for when doing a site for someone. £££'s I mean! obviously this is determined by the complexity of the site, client liaison time etc etc. The sites i'm looking at doing are simple, basic advertising tools, 3/4/5 pages, from scratch and getting it all up and running for them. Any idea? I was thinking of asking about £250-300?

If there are ant self employed developers out there I would really appreciate some info. I'm just looking into doing this for 6 months or so before I go traveling and start a career in the renewable energy sector, but if its successful then who knows?....

Regards

Roydy

 

[TamedTech]

Hey Roydy,

More than welcome for the reply.

I'm a self employed Dev, although its now mainly for my internal software rather than sites for clients and suchlike.

Pricing is always difficult, best bet is to hunt around and see what you can get in the local area, There are so many contributing factors that determine what price you pay, not just the complexity of the sites and its features, but whether it was built using a content management system, or if its an off the shelf design template ect.

I'd probably take a guess that you're under chargeing a little at the moment given the quality of the your personal site, however, you are also new to this game.

Like i say, have a hunt around, but when i first started out doing development with static sites including a contact form, i was charging around £600 and didnt get any complaints.

I'm now working on dynamic sites and web-applications and its then you can start charging alot more money for the product.

But to start with get a few static sites under your belt, lean CSS and XHTML well so that you can build a site in code which is clean and validates with w3c, once you're at that point you can start venturing into the world of ColdFusion which will open up a whole new avenue, for instants, when building database driven sites for client i would have been looking to charge around £1800 to £2000 for the project.

Again, if you strutcure the business concept properly, then you can look at building yourself 'widgets' of features for a site, so when some comes and says, "i want a site with X, Y and Z on it" you can simply place together you existsing elements, which means time saves, so your clients can benefit from reduced prices, and you benefit from extra profit.

Anyway, charge what ever you see fit, a developer is only as good as his portfolio, so start building up a list of sites that you've built as fast as possible, even it means not charging much in the begining.

Rob