webmasters i need you

londoner · August 8th, 2005, 04:22 PM

Evening all...

Need a few tips on mastering the web.

OK, i'm just about to start a new website and need advice on how best to structure it. This site will involve sorting data by certain categories.

Let me give you an example so you can understand exactly what i need.

YOU live in australia and want to buy a digital camera. I would like two dropdown boxes on my site that are dependant on each other, so that you can first chose the country you live in then the category you wish to browse.

i.e. Australia -> Digital Cameras ------ it then displays a page with retailers of digital cameras in Australia. (This isn't my actual idea just using it as an example)

Now i don't know much about web design so am pretty clueless when it comes to stuff like this. However after some brief research have found that I can do this using SQL (sounds pretty tough) or something called 'Varray' (?)

Can anyone tell me which technology would best suit me, considering the website will be fairly large, and provide useful links and tips. Very much appreciated.

Thanks in advance

jkrohn · August 8th, 2005, 05:12 PM

Well I hate to be the one to tell you this but you are in WAY over your head.

To run a site like you are suggestions you will need to know how to setup and maintain databases as well as a solid grasp on one of the many web programming languages. It appears to me that you have neither of these at this time.

If you plan to do this yourself you will need to learn both of these in order to have a successful website. There may be 3rd party frontends you could purchase but those would be big $$$$.

Jkrohn

londoner · August 8th, 2005, 05:44 PM

jkrohn you could well be right.

Just hoping that someone could suggest one of the more simple methods of constructing something as i suggested.

I have built a few websites before using dreamweaver and do have a basic knowledge of HTML. I was looking at a few other sites source and thought i could maybe keep it quite simple using this varray system (it's probably called something else but this is what it was called in the source code, maybe oracle? i don't know

).

From what I understood (which is probably completely wrong) was that I could create two or three drop down menu boxes that are dependent on each other. Each item in the menu has it's own 'option value' so that when say 'option 3' from menu 1 and 'option 6' from menu 2 were chosen it would display a certain pre-constructed page.

Is something like this possible? and if so are there any sites that could help me out? or any other suggestions?

Thanks again

bwcc · August 8th, 2005, 05:53 PM

Jkrohn is right. You will need to learn a number of markup languages and how to manage and program a database. Which may lead to another question - are you hosting this site or is someone else hosting it? That will come into play when you figure out what language and dbase you will use - whether your hosting company supports them.

My last company ran into an area to where we needed this, but were too cheap to actually hire a fulltime dba, so I learned it - and love it. I knew html and dhtml and picked up books on php to start. As far as markup languages are concerned, its a fairly easy one to start on. Then, pick up an advanced php/mysql book. Mysql will get you started in databases. Then, you can get into Jscript and ASP.

I strongly recommend knowing what you are doing, but there are also scripts already written that might do what you need them to do. Here are some links to look at - but I would recommend learning the languages or hiring someone to do it for you.

www.hotscripts.com
www.phpbuilder.com
www.phpfreaks.com

Iturea · August 12th, 2005, 02:14 PM

Quote:

Just hoping that someone could suggest one of the more simple methods of constructing something as i suggested.

Look into event handlers in JavaScript such as onfocus or onselect. Basically when a user selects something in the first drop down you would call the appropriate JavaScript event handler to trigger some function you create or pull from the web to fill the next drop down with the appropriate data. For large amounts of data you will need a database. For small amounts of data you can just hard code the values in a JavaScript array and pull the data from the array with a loop.