Hi, I'm relatively new to web design and in the past few days have learned all the basics of html and css, and picked up dreamweaver 8. I've been asked by a small organisation to create a website for them - they are a psuedo-charity that put together tourist walks that visit a series of historic places. They want a website in which they can have all their different walks, with information on each (including the route, the different things to see on the way etc). They'd also like the ability for people to comment on a particular walk if they have done it (moderated comments that have to be verified by them before being posted), have some kind of online rating system where people give a mark out of 5, and they want to be able to easily update and add new walks when they make them without much in the way of web design know-how.

I'm perfectly willing to learn any scripting or programming languages and I have a relatively large timeframe in which to do it, but I was just wondering what was the best way to proceed. I've got to organise hosting for them so is there anything in particular I should look for? cgi, php, asp etc? and which of all the available formats would be best to make such a website with the ability to easily add new content? as I said I will learn whatever I need to make the website work I just want to know in which direction it would be best to focus my learning efforts.

Many thanks!

ok tommyboyo,

basically, what i'd to is by hand draw out a rough idea for the relationship structure and set it out a little like explorer. e.g.:

Home
|
Routes
|
--------------------------
| | |
Walks Sights Location

or something to that effect. try to aim for 1 or 2 HTML documents per area.

for your rating system, try typing some text for instance:

How did you find this walk?:

or

Please Rate This walk.

then add this code (altered of course for your e-mail...and different options) and you'll have a drop-down box.

<form method="POST" ENCTYPE="text/plain" action="mailto:youremail@yourdomain.com">
  <p><select name="rating" size="1">
<option value="5">5 - Excellent, Extremely Useful</option>
<option value="4">4 - Very Good, Useful</option>
<option value="3">3 - Good, I learned something</option>
<option value="2">2 - Ok, but not really that useful</option>
<option value="1">1 - Not Useful At All, Sorry</option>
</select><input type="submit" value="Submit"></p>
  </form>

the next thing to do is to use Dreamweavers textarea for the comments and suggestions. these can be found in:



Insert --> Form Objects --> Textarea



when you insert it, if it asks you if you want to add the form tag, click "Yes" and it adds the code for it, now all you really need to edit for this code-wise, is the action for submitting. just add after the action= bit, mailto:yourname@yourdomain.com (note:: obviously you'll edit the e-mail to whatever yours is.



hope this helps you tommyboyo

good stuff thanks, given me something to start getting my teeth into.

hey, no problem, it's what the sites here for.

i might not have said this but for the site that your designing, i think sticking to HTML should do fine, you don't really need to learn any more languages.

however, if you wanted to enhance it (most designers do...once you've made it, you have to update it and keep it current) i would advise PHP, it allows you to write to a database.