I’m thinking about designing a website as a personal project to keep me busy, noting too heavy thet’ll take up my life but something I’d like to start all the same.
I’ve used Frontpage and Dreamweaver before to create basic pages and I understand most HTML tags though would find it difficult to code with just Notepad without having to check the design every few minutes.
I want to design a site such as a restuarant search guide where people use a search feature to find a place to eat. People could search by address, price, closest subway, veggies places, whatever…
Would I be best coding it using a specific program/tool or should I spend the time learning mysql and php ?
Is there a website design suite that offers a database creation option?
There are multiple issues tangled up in your question.
First is designing the flow through the web site. How does the user provide information and get info back as he goes from page to page? You don’t need tools to figure that out, you just need to lay it out on paper. It’s like designing a house, where you figure out how activities flow through different rooms.
Then you need to define the look and feel of your pages. How are the pages organized, how will you use color, graphics, and fonts. That’s where something like Front Page (I’ve not used Dreamweaver) comes in.
I’m not that big on web development tools because the code they generate is so bloated, and when there’s a problem that I can’t solve using the tool it’s hopeless to edit the code. I use a free text editor called NoteTab which has shortcuts for inserting HTML tags.
No matter how you accomplish the above, for the functionality you are describing you will need a database, and I have had good experience with MySQL.
PHP is a good server-side language which I’ve also used and has full MySQL support. There are excellent online resources for using it. Alternatively you could also use ASP, but I’m not as familiar with that, but I believe it also has MySQL support. You could also use Java J2EE if your host supports servlets, although that is a lot to learn if you don’t know Java already.
I have not developed industrial-strength commercial sites but here’s a site I developed for a graduate class. I used a text editor, PHP, and MySQL. (I started out using Front Page and gave up.) This is similar to you want to do but with bed & breakfasts instead of restaurants. This is not necessarily a suggestion for what you should do but gives you an idea of what can be done with those particular tools.
I do small websites and SEO for a living and ASP is a fine program but it’s costly. If this is a hobby to you, definately go with PHP.
Check with webhosts though first if you don’t wish to learn. I like pure coding myself. Front Page is full of propriety codes. I simply use CSS, HTML with some javascript thrown in. DHTML scripts are fun too.
Webhosts like 1and1.com offer hosting plans that include PHP without needing to know PHP. This would allow you to build a dynamic site with PHP without know it. It runs about $10 a month compared to simpler plans at $6/month to a very simple plan for $3/month. Depending on your webspace requirements.
One thing I would ask yourself though is the kind of website you are describing is pretty bloated. In other words there are a lot of similar sites out there. Would you want to draw traffic to it? If so NOW is the time to plan for Search Engine Optimization.
“SEO for Dummies” is a great book at the library to learn about it BEFORE you start the site, so you can know what to do to get your site to rank high in Google and others.
The biggest issue I have with my clients is they want to make their site all bells and whistles (AKA FLASH) and Flash is basically cool the first or second time you go to the site.
To be honest, I think you’d be best going with Notepad. After all, if you’re going to have a dynamic website (searches etc), then you’re going to have to code the logic that way - and if you’ve used Frontpage to make the layout you’ll never shoehorn the logic in correctly.
I agree with RCGDC that PHP is the way to go, although ASP has good things to be said for it, too. I did a little investigation a few months ago and while I could quite easily find hosting services offering PHP support for free, ASP hosting was expensive.
By learning the PHP and the MySQL, you’ll get an understanding of what’s happening on your site and you’ll be able to control how it works more closely.
I wrote this site in PHP and MySQL entirely in Notepad - Free Backgrounds - which contains a searchable database of wallpaper photos. It’s nothing special, but you can see that it’s quite simple to create the pages dynamically using PHP. There’s an admin area too, where I upload new images and enter the data into the database (or edit it), rather than having to manually create the entries.
Checking the HTML code all the time can be a pain, but it encourages you to be more careful as you type it, and you get more experience with debugging :).
My apologies. I really want to know which web tools create so much bloat. I use NoteTab every so often, but no longer for most of my web applications because time is money and NoteTab is a black hole here.
