Hi there, I am working on a website in Dreamweaver as a hobby in my spare time where I'm listing all the restaurants, clubs, and bars in my local area.
What I'm currently doing is creating a HTML page each time I add a new bar and so on (so I'd have a McDonalds.html and KFC.html page), this is incredibly time consuming and I imagine uses up a lot of my webspace. All the pages are laid out exactly the same with the same information e.g. number of seats, a picture, and description of the place.

Is there a way of creating a database which would hold all of the restuarants details, and have a page which dynamically pulls all of the content for a specific restuarant/bar from it and displays it to the visitor. e.g. visitor clicks on McDonalds link, and all the relevent McDonalds data is pulled from database, and displayed on a new page. (instead of creating hundreds of html pages from scratch each time). Can this be done in dreamweaver, do i need additional programs? Any advice would be appreciated, I am a total beginner, but a quick learner!
By the way my server agreement doesnt have MySQL, ASP or PHP server side scripting, but I'm able to upgrade, will i need to upgrade? I can run my own CGI with Perl 5.8, but thats it. Thanks. David.

Hi

If it's DreamweaverMX or Ultradev you are using then yes you can create a dynamic site using a database.

From the details you have given I would imagine an Access database would be quite sufficient and yes you would need to upgrade to a server that allows either ASP or PHP depending on your preference.

Can't really go into much detail here but there is a lot to think about before you do it but it can be done by a complete novice, just learn as you go along and there are lots of people only too happy to help.

Good luck.

Dave

ASP|VBScript|IIS5.1|Access|WinXPPro & WinXPHome

Thanks Dave for the reply, it's good to know there's lots of knowledgable people out there to help.

I'm ready to learn either way, but I was wondering which route is the best to take in terms of meeting my websites objectives laid out at start of this topic: ASP or PHP? Is one easier to grasp than the other?

Also, I am using Dreamweaver MX so it's good to know I can create the dynamic pages.

mmmm

ASP or PHP?? I've no idea which is easier, I've never even looked at PHP, I went straight for ASP basically because I'd never heard of PHP <img src=../images/dmxzone/forum/icon_smile.gif border=0 align=middle>

I think you'd be better off asking in the Ultradev forum rahter than this one.
There's bound to be someone who can answer that question.

Dave

ASP|VBScript|IIS5.1|Access|WinXPPro & WinXPHome