Good morning guys, only joined this morning so hello to everyone. My name is Nik and I'm learning so please be nice!! LOL.

 

Right basically, a friend is starting a hair salon and they have asked me to do their site which is great experience for me.

 

They want their own online booking system which will generate appointments for clients but WHICH WILL ALSO KNOW how long to offer as an appointment depending on the service the client chooses i.e - cut & colour would be 1hr 45 mins, a standard cut would 45 mins, a colour re-touch would be 50 mins etc etc. Is there a way to build this kind of system and if so can it be intergrated with say Outlook if you were running that as your diary system, I mean to say that if a booking is taken it automatically fills in the appointment in Outlook or something?

 

Is this really possible to build? Can someone who has limited experience in html/css and a little php stand a chance? Please give me your feed back. I would appreciate any comments.

 

Thanks guys,

 

Nik

Good morning guys, only joined this morning so hello to everyone. My name is Nik and I'm learning so please be nice!! LOL.

 

Right basically, a friend is starting a hair salon and they have asked me to do their site which is great experience for me.

 

They want their own online booking system which will generate appointments for clients but WHICH WILL ALSO KNOW how long to offer as an appointment depending on the service the client chooses i.e - cut & colour would be 1hr 45 mins, a standard cut would 45 mins, a colour re-touch would be 50 mins etc etc. Is there a way to build this kind of system and if so can it be intergrated with say Outlook if you were running that as your diary system, I mean to say that if a booking is taken it automatically fills in the appointment in Outlook or something?

 

Is this really possible to build? Can someone who has limited experience in html/css and a little php stand a chance? Please give me your feed back. I would appreciate any comments.

 

Thanks guys,

 

Nik

 

Hi Nik in all honesty probably not; something like this is quite technical and will require a good knowledge of PHP.

 

The only integration with outlook would be email notification of appointments. However if you're focusing on creating a booking system then there's no point bothering with outlook at all. All the appointments should be viewable by a backend accessible by staff only. This would be much more appropriate and professional.

 

If you are looking for someone to do this work then I can be of assistance. I'll send you a PM with further information.

 

Regards

James

I'm going to have to say no... as a beginner with little PHP, your really going to struggle with this. HTML/CSS won't really help you at all here apart from the client filling out the form, the rest is going to have to be some sort of PHP/MySQL backend.

 

The backend would have to:

 

: Check if the selected time is available

: Check if the duration of the service won't overlap a future service

: Check that the entry isn't a duplicate entry

: Add the entry to the database

: Display it in a user friendly manner for your friend to check

 

Or something similar to those steps. With little PHP experience, you would be best looking for some open source diary software or perhaps buy something.

Although the task itself is possible - it is pretty complicated and to be honest think it would be beyond anyone with only a little PHP and MySQL experience. You'd have to dedicate a lot of time learning, and developing, it'd probably take about 3 months at the end of which you'd realise you can go back and do it again a lot better (that's if you get to the end, some people get impatient and give up).

 

Depending on what this system is worth to you, I'd recommend you pay someone to do it for you. Everything you mentioned is possible, including the Outlook integration.

Can I point something out - what happens when a client books an appoint over the phone? Someone will need to go into the admin of your website to make it 'unavailable', and what happens if you get both a phone and a web booking for the same time slot at the same time?