I am designing my first commercially viable (hopefully!) site - only ever designed one site before - for my classic car club. So consider me a newbie at all this.

 

Right - the challenge: I am designing a new website that will feature all things golf around where I live. One feature will be a page on each of 40-50 golf courses in this area. There will be sections on:

Course overview (1-2 paragraphs)

Photos of some of the best holes (5-6 per course)

Verbal directions to the course

A jpg image of a route map

Latest prices and any special offers.

 

My question is this - for this task should I just have one page for each golf course with sections as shown above, or should I try and have a database with entries for each course.

 

Not sure if the latter is a good idea, and, if so, what I should do/avoid/look out for.

 

Any help really appreciated.

 

Richard

If the information doesn't get updated very often then you could get away with static pages, and any updates would be a matter of a few minutes or few hours work occasionally. However as you are looking to do things like latest prices which may change frequently it would make sense to use a database.

 

The obvious choice for something like this would be a Content Management System - you'd need something that allows you to easily add custom fields and associated data. If I was making this site I'd have no hesitaion in using Expression Engine for the job since it would offer you everything you need...

 

Ability to create custom fields for your data

- Course name

- Course overview

- Photos

- Directions

- Route map (could use embedded Google map code or similar)

- Latest prices

 

...plus anything else that might be relevant like contact details, phone numbers etc

 

Ability to categorise courses by location and or type, level whatever you want

 

Ability to display a summary of all courses in addition to the full details, eg you might want the option to view an overview all courses with current prices, each entry linked to the full detail page, or a list of club phone numbers.

 

Ability to do things like "course of the day" on any page, show random images anywhere on the site and so on.

 

Ability to associate courses with an events calendar, might be useful?

 

All this you can do out of the box with no addons or plugins. If the site was not-for-profit you can do all this with the free version of EE as well

 

Oh, and template/design wise there are no restrictions, you can build your site however you want.

The obvious choice for something like this would be a Content Management System - you'd need something that allows you to easily add custom fields and associated data. If I was making this site I'd have no hesitaion in using Expression Engine for the job since it would offer you everything you need...

Thanks for such a helpful and prompt reply - I'm very grateful. Just to add, the first site I designed Sol Classic Car Club was not very sophisticated (I'm hoping to build something more impressive) but I did it by just learning how to code HTML and CSS - I did not use any design package. Also, all my PCs run Linux, so most packages would not run on it anyway. I tried NVU (now called Kompose or something) but was less than impressed and found I could do it quicker once I had figured out the coding.

 

So I have to apologise for being so naive - i have no idea what a content management system is. I'll go straight to google tomorrow and find an idiot's guide. As to the software you recommend - I'll have to look into that as well. My guess is it will be Windoze only which I don't have. Is it possible for me to learn how to use CMS by building up my understanding from first principles and doing it myself, rather than using a package? I have plenty of time (retired) and like to learn how things actually work.

 

Thanks again for your generosity.

 

Richard

All CMS's run on the web server so all you need is a web browser - everything is done online so you can use Firefox

 

I am thinking any CMS will have a huge learning curve for you with your current ability as you do need a working knowledge of HTML and CSS, but have a look anyway and if it goes right over your head you can always stick with normal pages.

All CMS's run on the web server so all you need is a web browser - everything is done online so you can use Firefox

 

When you say the CMS runs on the web server, is this something that the web host should provide as an application? Sorry - getting ahead of myself. Don't know enough to ask the right questions. I'll do some research tomorrow and come back when I have something sensible to say.

 

I am reasonable enough around HTML/CSS - at least the basics. I wrote all the code for the above website from scratch. More a case of reasonable DEPTH but poor BREADTH I guess. <g>