Best way to design website (database) for online clothing store?

[fromSharon]

Well, I have been running my own website, www.littleboychic.com. I just know Dreamweaver well enough to design the site and use Yahoo merchant solution for the database (and shopping cart).

Now that my biz. seems like it's here to stay (whew!), I'd like my site to use some sort of ASP technology. My question is what is the "best value" approach for this goal? What I mean is with about 500 products (1000 subitems due to diff. sizes), what is the stable,cost and time effective database program? (MySQL, coldfusion?)

Do I need to hire (or learn myself) someone for scripting language (java, perl?) or I can stick it out with Dreamweaver?

As you can tell, I'm a newbie with lots of questions. I understand this is a big question and many books must have be written about this topic. So if you have your fav. book, please recommend it to me!

p.s. Right now we are paying Yahoo $100/mo to host our site and use their database program and shopping cart (+1% sales)

Thanks for much. :)

Sharon

[invertedpanda]

Well, your best bet considering your experience will probably be to look into an eCommerce package. A number of hosting providers give you one with the site. I don't have any experience with eCommerce, so I can't really help you there. Jumping into relational database design and scripting for something that can cost you big if you make a mistake is a bad idea :)

However, when you do start learning scripting and database work, factor in what platform you'll be running a server on - if your server is UNIX/Linux, don't expect to be able to do ASP.Net :) PHP runs on pretty much any platform, and is my personal favorite (not to mention it is incredibly versatile - I have a friend who wrote an OpenGL based 3d engine in PHP).

[jmarshall]

Hi,

This is kind of off topic for what your asking (as I am new to this as well I unfortunately cannot help you) BUT, was wondering if you used Yahoo Site Builder to design your site? I just launched a shoe store and am using Yahoo Merchant Solutions as well. Wondering what your experience has been if you don't mind?

Thanks!

Jen

[jmarshall]

I must be half asleep, you say right in the first paragraph you used Dreamweaver! Ignore me :-)