need advice on building a site

[mattmikulla]

Hello.

I want to take on a web design project for my family. The site will be for a picture frame moulding company. I have never built a site like this before so I need advice on where to begin.

I pretty good with flash, and dreamweaver, but this one will be all html and whatever language I need to use. I think I will need to involve databases, which I have never done. I also need to incorporate search functions.

The closest thing I have found that is similar to what I need to accomplish is this website http://www.internationalmoulding.com . (sorry, never posted here before).

Anyway, take a look at the site and the source code and give me some insight on what I need to learn and know to accomplish a similar site.

Any help appreciated.
matt

[PeOfEo]

A good foundation in html, a fairly well knowlege of css, and if you want forums and search forms etc, knowledge of a server side form of scripting. www.w3schools.com is a good place to start. You might consider getting a good book on html/xhtml/css.

[Vladdy]

No offense, but for a business website, your family would be better off hiring a pro.

The website you cited is not one to learn from coding wise. Your personal one shows nice flash work, but that approach won't cut it for a business (unless your family does not care about SE rankings, but then why would it need a web site...)

[PeOfEo]

I aggree with vlad about the webside you linked, it depends heavily on java script, and the worst mistake the writes made was failior to use a doc type. That is a huge no no.

[stickyjellypoo]

Heya Matt. Liked the photo gallery in your personal site. Very nifty. Especially liked the one of the little clay Simpson's sculptures. Quite spiffy. ;)

Anyway, two other things you should keep in mind. First off, what's the purpose of this site? If your answer is that your family's business needs a website then you need to keep digging. Too many clients draw a blank when you ask this, and it's only a tad important. ;) So make sure you have a hard, measurable goal to gauge the success of the site by. It might end up being a cool looking site, but if know one can find it, if it can't hold their attention, and if it doesn't affect the bottom line for the company than what purpose does it serve?

Second, who's your audience? Each audiences has certain likes and dislikes, online behaviors, technical abilities, and may only have so much bandwidth for their internet connection. Since this sounds like the first site your family's frame shop has had you most likely don't have web trends or other web statistics software. However, you can write a user profile of the average customer to try to get some idea for who this site will be talking to. Course you could also run usability tests as the site progresses, but who has the time or money for all that. ;)

Once you know this stuff you should have a better idea for what coding languages you'll need and which you should avoid. I mean, if 90% of your users are on 56K modem connections you don't want a monster site with all the bells and whistles weighing down their connection.

Maybe you've already thought about all of this, but I figured it couldn't hurt to bring it up. :) Good luck to ya. Looks like this project will be something new and interesting for you. :)

Hopin to be helpful,
Dusty. :D

[mattmikulla]

thanks all.

Here's the deal. We are a picture frame moulding distributor. The site will be for our clients who need to view what we carry. The site doesn't need bells and whistles. It does need a search function for certain types of mouldings. For example, black, gold, silver, 2 inches, 4 inches, etc. That is the part where I lack experience. Hiring a pro is not an option and I can build it myself. I just need direction or a path on what to research and how to achieve my goal.

All I'm asking is some insight on how to integrate search functions of this type and what to learn. Maybe certain applications might help. The site I mentioned before international moulding (http://www.internationalmoulding.com) is a perfect example of what I need to achieve. Some of you had criticisms about the site, but you did not say what exactly you would do to make it better. Someone mentioned a poor use of javascript. Could you be more specific?

How would you tackle a site like the above mentioned, what software, what code or scripting language, etc?

thanks

[Robert Wellock]

So basically you are after an e-commerce site where a user can set up account and purchase the frames online.

Or, are you just after a site, which is dynamic and has the search capacity of in-stock frames held within 'stock database/spreadsheet' the later can be fairly easily done with PHP and MySQL the former is fairly hard to master.

[mattmikulla]

Thanks for your reply. Ordering online is not necessary, so it is not really an e-commerce site. If anything, I'll have an email submission form for ordering because our accounts are set up before we sell. That way our customers can email their orders instead of faxing of phoning them in.

Also, we do not need to keep track of footage or stock. The purpose of the site is really for a customer to see what mouldings we carry (300-1000 profiles). If they are looking for a gold moulding they can search all golds. If they need something wide like a 4 inch moulding they can search by size.

The rest will just be contact info, location, specials, etc. That part is cake. I just need to know how to organize and search by size and color.

[PeOfEo]

you are still going to need a data base and a server side script to query that data base then. Not a beginniers project.

[Aronya1]

To answer the questions you asked: PHP & MySQL would be my suggestion. Both are free & there are lots of online resources for help (forums like these, for example).

However, I would agree with the others who state that this might be better handled by someone with experience. Unless there is no hurry in getting the site up, and it can wait a few months while you learn and experiment...

Good luck with it in any case.

[PeOfEo]

if you are still planning on doing it yourself, buy a huge thick book on whatever server side scripting you choose, then actually learn it.

[mattmikulla]

Are there any books out there that give insight to the actual processes involved for a project like this. I'm not talking web design for dummies, but a book that discusses a game plan for sites such as the one i might design.

Also, what scripting language should I use. I'm not afraid to get my hands or eyeballs dirty. If I do this I look at it as a challenge and another tool to add to my toolbox. It's worth mentioning that there would be no real deadline and we are just looking ahead, so I have time to research and learn what I need.

[PeOfEo]

what programming background you have and what your host supports is going to detirmine what you buy. ASP.NET ASP JSP PHP CGI CF are your options. asp.net uses vb, and can use c# and a bunch of other sutff, php has a syntax much like java, jsp is java, asp classic is vbscript.

[jeanne]

web_store.cgi from X-tropia or xtropia.com has a lot of help and training right in it for building databases as well as taking orders on the web and security, and it's free.