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what is the best way of setting up an online catalogue that is easy to update. At the moment I have the data in Excel and just export it as a html file. I need a better way of doing it as eventually I want to set up online ordering. The catalogue is massive by the way, and is quite often updated.
Any tips, solutions, languages to use, books to read would be most useful. I'm not a beginner at programming, but lack knowledge about complex online stuff.
thanks in advance
nick
Your best bet would be to use an actual database to store all of the data in. Then once the database is set up, use ASP to connect to and manipulate data in the database. A good book on asp is "Active Server Pages Unleashed" pubed by sams. If the number of items in your catalogue is really huge, then you should use SQL server for your database. If not, access gets the job done. Hopes this helps some. reply back if you wanna ask anything else.
thanks for the advice.
two questions at the mo. Does the database actually have to be stored on the webserver? and if so in which form, coz the webserver we have is a unix one.
Second what about the online ordering business, or do you think I should forget about that now.
Cheers
Nick
actually, it is best to have the database on the server, and you should probably get IIS to run active server pages.
you should not worry about the online ordering as of yet, just concentrate on getting the basics up first. Plus it takes alot of time to make a good online store.
aren't there problems with getting IIS running on unix servers though, and what exactly is it??!!?? Can the database just be made in Access.
Cheers
Nick
i've read that I am going to have to use PHP and CGI as our website is on a Unix server. What's that all about then??
Nick.
o yeah sorry, if you are running a unix server you probably dont want to use asp or access or any of the easy stuff. personally, i dont know cgi or php very much, since i have never needed to use it.