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today CatgutMusic.com went online. i’ve stuck to HTML; table as frames - all very old-school standards - no 2.0 crap for this little site. its a sturdy ‘website’ in the long tradition of band homepages. plent of room to grow, and I really hope our friend does well with this venture.

there’s a fine ‘listen’ section, which uses a great free php-player (FlamPlayer), track-listings are in place and the ‘buy’ pages are operational Lord Vader, and I’m really happy about Paypal’s “Buy it Now” system which requires no up-front commitment or long term planning in terms of scale; on-the-fly editing is possible with a few tweaks on the page that delivers punters to payment… no running back to Paypal to authorize changes.

we bypassed the whole cart system that had in the past caused considerable ’scope-creep’ with previous site builds. i’ve just learned that selling in 1’s and 2’s does NOT require any level of eMerchant-ing, php-carts and all that.

sadly Paypal take an unfair cut in my opinion (1.9% to 2.9% + 20p) on every sale - although not shocking I should have thought the amount of money paypal have already made from eBay sales (if you accept money via Paypal it costs you, if you send money to a bank account it costs you) should balance out any security costs involved in this p.r. ritch Website Payment sector… with our integration of Paypal on Catgut Music .com they are pretty much getting the only ad on the entire webpage (links don’t count!).