There has got to be a better way

[FurnaceFixerGuy]

If the furnace makers held all the info on their own sites in a sensible format, then you could use YQL to pull the data in and not worry about maintaining it yourself.

None of them do that. That is the main reason for the site I'm building. What I'm doing here doesn't exist for the consumer who can fix their own furnace. Finding out which part you need for your furnace is what keeps most homeowners calling in the pros.
I imagine that some people will use my site as a reference and maybe even buy elsewhere. And that's ok too, we want to be the "Nice Guys" in the business.

[Spinner]

Aha, I stand corrected! With something like thousands of records, there is no doubt.

Get your feet wet with a LAMP-stack then, maybe?

[FurnaceFixerGuy]

It looks as though I will have to grit my teeth and learn something new. Any suggestions as to which language I start with?
I figure since knowledge is power, I can only end up a better person after it's all over.
I am intrigued by the power and variety of usage of PHP, I'm leaning toward learning that first. At least I think so anyways. LOL

[Spinner]

The "LAMP-stack" I mentioned is a shorthand name for Linux Apache MySql and PHP.
PHP would be the server-side scripting-language, MySql is a database for storing data, Apache is the websever and Linux would be the operating system.

First, let me ask you how your webpage is hosted today? Is it hosted by you, or externally? If it's external, it might be on a hosting solution based either on IIS (Windows) or Apache (Usually some kind of Linux).
You might be hosting it from your windows workstation for all I know...
Regardless though, PHP is probably not the worst place to start. There are tons of tutorials to get you started with PHP & MySql, and this is not wasted knowledge regardless of your hosting-solution.

[FurnaceFixerGuy]

I'm hosted at Godaddy.com on linux servers.

[Spinner]

Then you should be able to use php and mysql from what I can tell.
You might need to change your account-settings with Godaddy, I don't know, but I am sure they can assist you to get things set up correctly.

Then PHP would be the way to go.
Good luck!

[FurnaceFixerGuy]

Thanks for the info, been looking up PHP tutorials all morning. I'll probably need to get a book.