Hi everyone

My name is Anna, I'm from London and I look forward to taking part and hopefully getting some help with web development.

I have designed a music website in Flash and my problem is that I have used a scrollbar whereby people scroll through and choose the song they want to try before buying. The site can be found at www.ontherunprod.com which will give you an idea of what I mean. I have left aligned it to make room for the shopping cart.

But basically, I have two major stumbling blocks which are:

1. How do I add the html for add item to shopping cart with the html provided by paypal if it is a scrollbar and the track cannot be seen if it is at the bottom?

2. Once payment has been confirmed how do I set it up so that buyers will be able to automatically (without human interaction)download the songs irrelevant of which album or track they choose?

I have the additional pressure of being over the deadline(even though it is unpaid), so if anyone can help me that would be fantastic and I will be eternally grateful.

Anna

Youve made one fatal mistake

E-commerce sites done in flash cause loads of problems, and each product cannot be bookmarked or shown to other ppl due to there being only one url.

Thanks for the advice, I know you are right, I am kicking myself now but is there nothing I can do? What if I break it down into swf's and load each artist on it's own html page, would that work?

Well i wouldnt change it now you have done it, just learn from the mistake in the future.
Unless, the client asks for it. Also your over the deadline so not much use wasting more time on it just get it up and running asap.

And how come they arent paying? :P sorry for being nosey

I'm just starting out as a designer so I needed someone to build a site for and a family member said he needed to sell music for a few friends he knew as no one seemed interested in their music, so I said I would do it. The problem is that it started out as him wanting to sell two albums but it seems to be growing, which is another problem with using Flash.

So do you think it would be okay to use seperate html pages with the swf's inserted? Or shall I give up on the whole website design idea and crawl under a rock somewhere?

Ye you could do swf's like that. Are you using paypals shopping cart?

yes, they said they would give me html code to add to the tracks

Do you mean the Buy buttons they supply?

This was what PayPal told me to do to sell the music tracks:

1. Enter the details of each item to sell into PayPal's item form.

2. PayPal will generate custom HTML code for each item to sell.

3. Copy the HTML code and paste it into web page files next to each
respective item.

4. This code will result in 'Add to Basket' buttons on the web
pages.

5. PayPal will provide the HTML code for a Shopping Basket Icon to
place in the upper right hand corner of the web pages. This icon will
link buyers to their basket.

So whats the problem?

First of all sypher I would like to thank you for the time you have spent helping me.

Okay, my original question I guess for the paypal was, if I am using a scroll bar and the track that people select is at the bottom of the said scrollbar, how would the add button scroll with the item?

And secondly, once the payment has been confirmed how do I set it up so that buyers will be able to automatically (without human interaction) be directed to a page where they can download the songs from the basket?

Just my 2 cents here, but do you not think you've gone a bit over your head here with this being your first project???
You've gotta learn to walk before you can run as they say.
The site would be easy enough to design in PHP and HTML and run off a database. If your gonna spend 3 days looking for the solution to the flash thing, i would suggest to stop everything your doing.
I don't know what kinda level your working at, but if you were to put some hard graft in, you could have a far better site, and easier to modify, through PHP and mySQL. This could be done in 3 days!
I hope you find a solution to this, as it seems to have potential.

Craig

All crits are welcome, of course you are right, but the site was originally for a family member to sell two albums that were not attracting attention. I thought that if it was visually stimulating and focused on the artists rather than on lines of links to listen to their music people would be closer to the artist and as The Meteors put it 'Up close and personal', but it seems that it has attracted other artists that also want to sell their music.

I thought about using PHP even though I no nothing about it, but a lot of people told me not to because it would take too long to learn.

I guess I will continue with the swf's in Html and hopefully someone can help me with the PHP code to direct buyers to download their tracks, get it up and running and learn PHP and SQL as quickly as I can.

Wow, I've been developing for years and even I wouldn't know how to the things you need to get done and integrated into flash. To be honest, and since its not a paying job, I'd ask the client/family member to wait a while longer while I converted the entire thing into xhtml.

As for services which allow downloads after purchase: http://payloadz.com/

Nice resource herk thanks

I remember doing a site which you could buy songs from. Wish i had that herk would of stopped all the headaches.

When you click on a song at the bottom your best having your buy button underneath the information. With the buy button linkin to a standalone html page so you can do whatever you need then.
When you mean scrollbar do you mean iframe?

Thanks Herkalees, I will try that out today , you may have saved me! I used a listbox component and I will probably list the tracks in another column.

hi and welcome to the forums!