Pls I am a newbie and I need help. i am developing a site that involes voting for a winner amongst various nominees(about 5) for different categories of awards (about 10 categories). There has to be only one vote per category and u should vote by clicking on the nominees picture.The script should count the votes and hopefully collate the results
I have not written any php before so i dont know how i can do this but i think i can get each vote sent to an email address where they can be counted manually but this would get tedious after a while.So i need some sort of automated solution.
Can I use javascript to implement this?
Also how do i make sure people dont come back to vote multiple times?
Any suggestions would be higly appreciated

The best overall solution for you is to use cookies to store each vote per category, then tally the votes on the last page. You will need code to determine whether the particular category has been voted on based on if the client's cookie is currently holding the information for that category. Unfortunately, if the client clears the cookies in his/her browser, they will be able to come back again to vote. Unless you plan on creating a login script to go along with this voting system, there is no other solid way to eliminate multiple votes.

thanx synapsex but it is all still greek to me, how do i create a cookie? If the cookie option is too difficult how do i implement a basic form of the solution. I was thinking of using forms with radio buttons, that will send the values to a mail box.
If I could get some code that will point me in the right direction i would be grateful

Pls anyone want to help out. I am running out of time