Hi guys,

I've just started to create a site in dreamweaver mx with the intention of promoting bands/solo artists through various musical genres. Although i hear it is easier in the longrun, I do not code html as coming from a design background, i've always prefered the more hands-on approach by using the 'design' view. Naturally, for a beginner, i have discovered a number of stumbling blocks that i need a bit of guidance on.....
• Firstly, i would like to include a search engine. (when a user wishes to search for a specific band - as ebay has for searching for items). How do i create one of these?
• Secondly, I will be looking to setup a subscription menu to allow users to register to my site after making a payment by inputing their payment details. They are such common-place throughout the web and look so simple but i have no idea how to create one! How do i create one of these?
• Next, i would like to set-up a forum to allow users to post topics - like the one we're on now i suppose. How do i create one of these?
• Lastly, being that this will be a site where people can advertise their musical ability, it would be handy if they could upload pictures, demo samples, etc. How to i go about doing this?

As i said before, i am not very well clued up with my html coding but if you are able specify to me which particular codes i would need to input then please go ahead. Alternatively, i would prefer to create my site in the 'design' view.

If you have any questions about the above, please do not hesitate to ask me.

regards,

Greg

Nice project!

What You'll need!

Some dynamic web page, that means ASP or PHP. Choice is Yours.
Example: for user subscription you must create database with user login, new user registration etc...

For search: where to search? I presume search through your database of bands, artists, songs.....Database again!

For uploading: you need something like CMS (content management system).
Again You need database with login, password,.......

Conclusion: dynamic page which contain more than HTML code, it also contain some programing code.

Hi Moondog,

Thanks for your reply - very helpful.
However, could you please be a bit more specific? I'm new to web design so i'll need to know how i create a 'dynamic web page'.
I'm beginning to realise the limitations of not knowing any form of code be it programming language or database language. For a start i dont know the difference between HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL! So i guess i'm ging to have to get my head around that. Do you have any idea where to start with it? It's such a daunting prospect!

Wow!!! It sounds like a lot even to an experience web programmer. So for a novice, I suggest you do and learn it bit by bit. If you need to have your website setup soon, you will need to find a programmer. Otherwise, you won't be able to learn all these in a split of sec.

So you may want to focus on building your database for your search engine first. I would suggest you look into MySQL for this because it is open source and it won't charge you much.

Good luck

Have a look at http://www.jamroom.net/ - it's a Content Management System which does what you are trying to achieve. You'll need someone to help you set it up but there's plenty of people there willing to help.

Are you actually looking at creating these or would you rather use pre-install scripts that could possibly do what you want?

The reason being, because you're a novice, I think you would be better learning the basics than diving head first and straight into programming something like a search engine, forum and a means to advertise. The forum is quite possibly the largest task out of all of these and in most cases, you never would want to work alone on this unless it's very basic.

It's not impossible for you to actually go ahead and create these types of applications yourself, but I feel having a strong understanding of the fundmentals is better than actually putting together pieces that you may not fully understand.

So I suggest, learning HTML/XHTML and CSS for web page designing and understanding how documents are actually rendered for the web.

Then I would suggest learning a dynamic language like PHP especially regular expressions to help you understand searching techniques.

Then knowing SQL would be good so you can work with relational databases like MySQL using PHP as well.

What you may want to do however to shorten the development time is to actually take an already existing project that does partially what you want and just add modules onto that to fullfil the rest of your requirements, though you'll still need to understand the above, or it may make no sense whatsoever.

Cheers,


MC