I give up. Website help?

Factual Questions
1

Oh my freaking Og I GIVE UP I GIVE UP I GIVE UP.

I am not a coder. I am not a web designer. I am not an anything but a pitiful little insurance salesman. I am frustrated beyond belief, have gone through a bag of jellybeans and want to find a goat to kick in the nads.

I turn to you for help.

I am an insurance agent, and as such I operate a website for people to learn about insurance and to get quotes on insurance products. Simple enough, right?

You can find it here. I’m moderately proud of it. Click on “FREE Georgia Insurance Quote” or one of the blue buttons or something. It’ll take you to the free quote page.

There, thar be dragons.

You see, I’m using an iframe to embed this page into the post. In Safari it looks okay - in any other browser it’s an orgy of failure.

Even in Safari, when you get to steps three and four you have to scroll around like a deranged orangutang just discovering what scrolling is.

How the bleeding HELL do I embed this stupid page into this stupid post so that it just works? Is it even possible? I don’t want to scroll about, I don’t want to make every single client I have use Safari, I just want to stick my retarded little quote engine into that freaking page and MAKE IT GOOOOOOO.

Sorry. I am frustrated. And high on sugar.

I don’t care what I have to do. I don’t care if I have to draw two pentagrams copulating and then sacrifice a testicle to Satan. Do you guys have any insight into how to get this thing to work properly?

And yes, I know that in order to see the thing working in all phases, you’re going to have to actually fill out the quote form. I’ve set it up (the one thing I’ve figured out how to do) so that if you enter a certain set of information, it’ll automatically filter you out and you’ll never have any sort of insurance sales stuff thrown at you. Don’t worry. Your information is safe and sound with me, and will never be shared or re-sold, especially since you’ll be using fake info to test it. If you’re the kind, kind person who has decided to save my sanity and several walls from holes, then please use the following information to test:

First Name: Hi
Last Name: Opal
Zip Code: 30060

The other stuff doesn’t matter. Thank you, guys. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I am going absolutely insane here.

2

Can’t you just replace height=104% with height=“600px” or similar for the iframe?

I’m not a web designer either, but that worked when I tested a local copy of the page.

3

This worked for me too… give it a try and let us know how it goes!

I love your site, by the way. I like your articles and especially the little thumbnail photos you chose to go with the articles, like the dog brushing his teeth and the all the others. It looks like you have taken a lot of time and care in putting the site together!

4

Check it out now - width and height both set to 600px. The initial part is great, but then on page two things start to slide downhill and on page three the quoting tool becomes a major pain to use because you’re forced to scroll from side to side to see the plan name and then the price. I know it’s a minor thing, but even the tiniest inconvenience to my site visitors slashes my conversion rate and drops my profit margin.

nyctea scandiaca, thank you! It’s very kind of you to say so. That site has been my baby for a while now and I really enjoy working on it.
Update: I figured at least one thing out. The width, for this to work properly, needs to be 770px (which I have reset it to). Setting it to 770px overlaps the sidebar pretty severely. So, for this page, and this page alone, I need the sidebar to be disabled. I know I can do that with conditional tags, but I don’t understand how to use them. Thoughts?

5

I thought it would perhaps help if I posted my current sidebar.php:


<div id="sidebar">
<div id="sidebar-ads">
<a href="http://georgiainsuranceoptions.com/free-quote/">
<img src="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/wp-content/themes/arthemia/images/banners/square.jpg" alt="" width="300px" height="250px" /></a>

</div>
  
<div id="sidebar-top"> 
<?php 	/* Widgetized sidebar, if you have the plugin installed. */ 					if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar(1) ) : ?>

<?php endif; ?>
</div>

<?php
?>
<div id="sidebar-middle" class="clearfloat"> 
<div id="sidebar-left">
<?php 	/* Widgetized sidebar, if you have the plugin installed. */ 					if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar(2) ) : ?> 		
<?php endif; ?> 
<ul><?php wp_list_bookmarks('categorize=0&category=17&title_li=0&show_images=0&show_description=0&orderby=name'); ?></ul>
</div>  

<div id="sidebar-right">
<?php 	/* Widgetized sidebar, if you have the plugin installed. */ 					if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar(3) ) : ?> 		

<h3>Blogroll</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://colorlabsproject.com">Colorlabs Project</a></li>
<li><a href="http://michaelhutagalung.com">Michael Jubel</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.hannasyalala.com">Hanna Siahaan</a></li>
<li><a href="http://majarimagazine.com">Majari Magazine</a></li>
<li><a href="http://bloggerzine.majarikanayakan.com">The Bloggerzine</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.majarikanayakan.com">Majari Kanayakan</a></li>
</ul>
<?php endif; ?>
</div> 

</div>

<div id="sidebar-bottom"> 
<?php 	/* Widgetized sidebar, if you have the plugin installed. */ 					if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar(4) ) : ?> 		
<?php endif; ?> </div>   
</div>

Basically, I want to use two conditional tags. The first one, I want to put in sidebar.php so that if_page(free-quote), there is no content displayed in the sidebar.

I want to use another conditional tag elsewhere to make the whitespace larger…but I fear I don’t even know where to begin looking for that one.

6

I haven’t looked hard into this, I simply don’t have the time, but if you are using php, then you don’t have to worry about conditional tags. Just start sidebar.php with a piece of php code that checks the url string to see what page you are on. If page <> free_quote then write out all the sidebar stuff. Else - don’t write out anything just end if.

7

Burrito, gotcha. Okay. We’re nearly there!!

Check it out now.

The last step, the one that is thwarting me - expanding the content area on this page alone to the proper width. I have found this support post that nearly answers my question, but I don’t quite get it (it’s the last post in the thread). Container/wrapper? Wha?

8

Your quote thingy and the rest of the stuff in that white are is in a containing DIV with the ID of “content”.

Your CSS has a designation for #content (meaning it pertains to anything with the ID of content) and it is set to be 590px in width.

This doesn’t work if what you’re trying to contain is more than 590px in width.

Where you are setting the sidebar to be turned off, can you also add this?
<style>
#content{width: 770px;}
</style>

9

The container/wrapper is the higest level div (or table) that you have that wraps up and contains all the rest “stuff”. For your side bar.php it is <div id=“sidebar”> at the very top and all the side bar “stuff” is contained in that box/div.

What that post you referred to is saying is that you should use an if statement to determine what page you are on (as described in my last post) and if it is the quote page you should write out a div that is wider than if you are not on the quote page. ie. if page = quotePage, write out <div id=“quotePageTextArea”>. Else write out <div id=“normalTextArea”> This assumes that you are using stylesheets to control the width of the “text area” section of your page, but you could also write out the width in normal html with the same method (<div id=“textArea” width=“700px”>)

I know that you are using php in the sidebar which you are including in the page, are you using php in the page itself?

10

Also, Soul, I am concerned that you are making these changes directly on your website. I hope this is not your normal practice and you are only doing this temporarily this one time so that us Dopers can help you. Otherwise you should really have a test area to do this stuff in where it won’t affect your production code/site.

Your site looks nice by the way. Did you design it yourself, or is that something WordPress gave you a template for (I have no idea what WordPress is)?

11

DIV ID “content” has the following goo describing it:

#content {
width:590px;
background:#fff;
padding:10px;
font-size:1.05em;
line-height:1.75em;
float:left;
min-height:400px;
}

I have created a new whatchamacallit, #widecontent with the following goo:

#content {
width:720px;
background:#fff;
padding:10px;
font-size:1.05em;
line-height:1.75em;
float:left;
min-height:400px;
}

I have, with the absolute genius help of you guys, gotten it to where the free quote page displays the proper content, and the other pages display their proper content. Yes!!!

Now…why is the free quote page gray while every other page is white?

You guys have been so, so helpful, and we’re so close to having it perfect. I really, truly appreciate everything you guys are doing to hold my hand like this.

And Burrito, no worries. The vast majority of the time I do not make changes to my website while it’s live, but with the level of help I needed on this one I unfortunately have had to keep it up throughout. I have about forty backups currently from different steps of this process to make sure I can revert it if I break something. So, a double thank you to you guys: you’ve been helping me immensely and doing it quickly, which means less downtime for the site, which means my business is healthier. Thanks!

12

While viewing all of your CSS definitions using the Web Developer Toolbar in Firefox, I don’t actually see a class called #widecontent. Are you sure you really added it? Did you update your CSS file?

13

Note that I r dum – the second code snippet up there should start #widecontent {

And yes, I’m…pretty sure. I added that to stylesheet.css, which is where the class #content was located.

14

I see it now. Was cached.

There’s no ; after 720px

15

You did it!!! Silly freaking semicolons!

Hah! It’s fixed! It works! You guys rock my world, truly. Thank you!!

I don’t have access to a PC - can anyone verify that it looks okay in IE?

16

Yeah looks fine in IE6. Can’t speak for 7 or 8.

17

My world - you rock it. Thank you!!