Website design software recommendation

jojonic

Hi MSE'ers

Im looking to set up a new website and wanted a recommendation of software to use. Im not a programmer, I am computer literate but cant do HTML so need a nice easy to use front end.

The site Im looking to create is a review type site and I want visitors to be able to search by postcode and also for the companies listed to be listed as #1 out of 23 companies in BH21 XXX or similar. Think tripadvisor but for a niche marketplace of companies.

Helpful comments please. This isnt going to be another get rich quick review site and I havent even worked out if Im going to make any money from it yet. I can just see a gap in the marketplace and would genuinely like to set up something people will find useful.

Thank you in advance

mj12_2

Dreamweaver, Frontpage..... did i say Dreamweaver? :-) Both are WYSIWYG so no programming knowledge required.

You wont be able to make areview site without learning code though i'm afraid as you will need a back end database and PHP scripts to access it (bare minimum)... its not difficult to learn if you have a few days to spend but you wont find out of the box software to do it for you (i dont think)

steve1980

mj12 wrote: »

You wont be able to make areview site without learning code though i'm afraid as you will need a back end database and PHP scripts to access it (bare minimum)... its not difficult to learn if you have a few days to spend

A few days to learn MySQL! Seriously?


You should not be doing this on your own. You are way out of your depth. What's your budget?

As for making money, the only way you'll make some dosh is by selling advertising but why are companies going to pay out x amount of money to a site which could feature their advert and also slag them off!

Sooler

Wordpress might be a workable solution, host it yourself or use http://wordpress.com/

The design of your site can be altered using templates and plugins

Use a post for each review.

Search by location can be added with a plugin
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-custom-fields-search/

chrissawyer21

use microsoft web developer.. its free to download with lots of tutorials available

jojonic

Thanks for replies... I was looking at wordpress, apparently they have CMS databases available too and you can download other templates to make it more like a website and less like a blog...

Maybe Im calling it the wrong thing... its not so much for written reviews as for previous customers to rate how they feel dealing with the company went, maybe some short comments too. Is it tricky to learn how to place a click rating on a site (i.e. quality of product 1 -5, customer service 1 - 5 etc) and then somehow amalgamate these into overall ratings, just like amazon and a million others do?

steve1980 wrote: »

A few days to learn MySQL! Seriously?


You should not be doing this on your own. You are way out of your depth. What's your budget?

As for making money, the only way you'll make some dosh is by selling advertising but why are companies going to pay out x amount of money to a site which could feature their advert and also slag them off!

Maybe out of my depth, what can I say - Im ambitious, or stupid, but will find out myself in time. Budget wise, as little as possible to start with. Money making - I would rather think I would get paid a referral fee for customers who place an order with companies my site has reviewed as the result of a click through. Im starting to contact companies in the industry to see if this idea is a goer, just trying to figure out if I can do it alone or if its going to cost me money to get it set up.

Keep the ideas coming guys! :T

mj12_2

steve1980 wrote: »

A few days to learn MySQL! Seriously?


You should not be doing this on your own. You are way out of your depth. What's your budget?

As for making money, the only way you'll make some dosh is by selling advertising but why are companies going to pay out x amount of money to a site which could feature their advert and also slag them off!

I dont see why it should take more than a few days to learn how to create a table and use php to insert/select data from it... after the table you only need three or four commands to make a barebones query call and fetch the data

mj12_2

jojonic wrote: »

Thanks for replies... I was looking at wordpress, apparently they have CMS databases available too and you can download other templates to make it more like a website and less like a blog...

Maybe Im calling it the wrong thing... its not so much for written reviews as for previous customers to rate how they feel dealing with the company went, maybe some short comments too. Is it tricky to learn how to place a click rating on a site (i.e. quality of product 1 -5, customer service 1 - 5 etc) and then somehow amalgamate these into overall ratings, just like amazon and a million others do?



Maybe out of my depth, what can I say - Im ambitious, or stupid, but will find out myself in time. Budget wise, as little as possible to start with. Money making - I would rather think I would get paid a referral fee for customers who place an order with companies my site has reviewed as the result of a click through. Im starting to contact companies in the industry to see if this idea is a goer, just trying to figure out if I can do it alone or if its going to cost me money to get it set up.

Keep the ideas coming guys! :T

The actual code to do what you want isnt complicated it is however a bit fiddly as you'll need at least four programming languages, MYSQL (database) PHP (scipting/data retrieval) CSS (display formatting) and HTML (markup) if you like i can point you in the right direction to get started if you post a detailed breakdown of what you want to do with reviews ie can people input text, or just click on a star to rate etc, you'll be able to figure out HTML and CSS easily enough though once you have got started they become quite self explanatory.

I would suggest you begin first by learning how to create a table in MYSQL - try here http://sql-info.de/mysql/examples/CREATE-TABLE-examples.html for an easy tutorial (you'll obviously need a server/hosting with mysql to do this).

once you have a table have a read up on using PHP with mysql, to get you started here is a very very basic example of connecting to and getting data from a mysql database with PHP.

$host="localhost";
$username="database_username";
$password="database_password";
$database="database_name";
mysql_connect($host,$username,$password);
mysql_select_db($database);
mysql_set_charset("utf8");

This block of code established a connection to your databse using the specified variables host,username passsword; once a connection is established the database is selected and a character set specified. The character set is optional and would only really be required if you're working with a language other than english.

OK, so you now have a connection to your database, lets say you have a table called 'reviews' with 3 columns 'name','rating','text'; to select all the entries in that table you would do this:

$sql = "SELECT * FROM reviews";
$result = mysql_query($sql);
while ($row=mysql_fetch_assoc($result)){
$name = $row;
$rating = $row;
$text = $row;

DO SOMETHING WITH THE DATA FROM EACH ROW HERE
}

Here we define a query "SELECT..." which tells MYSQL to fetch all the rows from the reviews table (*) means all. then we tell php to run the query and assign the output to a variable ($result). The part after 'while' just tells PHP to assign each row in the table in turn to an array (data map) called $row then gets each individual column from that array. ONce this is done you can do waht you like with the data. The part of code inside the {} will be executed for each row in your query.

literally its that simple - now obviously you would need more than this to make a functioning website but you get the idea - we only needed 4 different commands to get data from the database with PHP.

Now lets say you want to insert something into your table:

$name= "John Doe";
$rating= 4.5;
$text= "Excellent laptop, fast as lightning";
$sql = "INSERT INTO reviews (name,rating,text) VALUES('$name','$rating','$text')";
mysql_query($sql);

there you go, you've inserted a new row into your database with the Name of 'John Doe', the rating of '4.5' and the text 'Excellent laptop, fast as lightning'.

Now you want the average rating from all rows in your database:

$sql = "SELECT AVG(rating) as rating FROM reviews";
$result = mysql_query($result);
$avgrating = mysql_result($result,0,'rating'); - this is just a different way of getting data from the result, its faster when there is only one field as in this case - the query will just return the average rating.

so now the average rating for all result in your database is stored in the variable $avgrating, to print it on the screen you would use

echo $avgrating;

To get ratings over a certain value you could use "SELECT AVG(rating) as rating FROM reviews WHERE rating>3" - this would give you the average of all ratings over 3.

pitkin2020

Wordpress, its not just for blogging. I use it and don't have a blog. You should be able to get a plugin for what you want aswell, that would be far the simplest option.

jojonic

mj12 wrote: »

The actual code to do what you want isnt complicated it is however ... etc

thank you so much, this is really helpful although at this time of night after a couple of vinos Im thinking I'd better paste it into word and save it to look at in the morning!

Its just a star or 1 - 5 rating system Im wanting really, if comments can be included great but I dont want some lengthy site with peoples ranting essays all over the place.

Essentially something like amazon or trip advisor where you rate certain characteristics from poor to excellent, but it would be great to build in a ranking tool which gives the viewer their top 5 or 10 choices near to their postcode area.

Will have a better look tomorrow and come back with any more questions (because I know you're just dying to help )

Seriously, I love this forum, theres always someone to help with the things you need :beer:

steve1980

jojonic wrote: »

....Im thinking I'd better paste it into word and save it to look at in the morning!

You don't want to do that! If you ever copy any coding you want to paste it into Notepad, not Word!