Forum Moderators: phranque
My site will be a directory of audio and video learning resources from a number of different providers. When a user comes to the site they will have the option to go into any of a number of categories (and sub-categories) or to search from among the entries. We expect to have several thousand titles available with each title having its own page showing a picture of the title, information about it and displaying a link to a third-party website where the visitor could purchase the title. I would also like to allow visitors to the site to rate and/or review titles.
Essentially what I'm envisioning for the technology is "Amazon lite". It obviously won't be as robust and full-featured as what Amazon has developed but I think the general functionality and look and feel will be somewhat similar. Having said all this, I have the following questions:
1. What approximately would something like this cost to have developed? Part of me thinks that this should be fairly inexpensive given the number of different sites currently doing something similar. Maybe there's even an off-the-shelf solution available (if anyone can think of one, please let me know). On the other hand, maybe this is more complex that I imagine.
2. What would be a good route to go down to get it developed? I've sourced a few projects recently through ELance and have been very happy with the results. However, I'm a bit nervous to do that with this project given its potential scope. I have a few "local" people that could probably do this.
3. Any thoughts on the best platform for developing something like this in. My gut tells me MySQL/PHP might make the most sense and be the most cost-effective. However, I haven't done much development work so I'm not entirely sure?
Well, I have other questions but for now I'll leave it at that. Thanks in advance for any help with this. I really, really appreciate it.
Here are some quick answers to your questions:
1) hard to tell. If I were bidding I'd estimate it to be a few thousand dollars. You have a DB to create, plus you need to write a way to get the data in. DB design doesn't come cheap.
2) ELance is OK as is guru.com or just post something here on the Commerical Exchange. You'll get lots of leads.
3) mySQL/PhP is fine, as would any technology. I'm confortable in ASP so I would use ASP. All would get the job done.
I do lots of database design for my clients. I find it difficult to convince them that we must allocate 50 percent of the schedule to defining the data structures before we start coding. Your code can be rock solid, but if it's talking to poorly designed database, you're still in trouble.
Hire a pro and expect to pay a decent price. I agree with Txbakers. A few thousand bucks for a mySQL or SQL server database.
The data for the database is currently sitting in an Excel spreadsheet and would need to be ported into the database. In addition, there would need to be some sort of GUI to get additional data into the database and make additions, deletions and modifications.
One of my key concerns is making sure that a proper foundation is laid. Eventually this may become an e-commerce site and so I want to make sure that whatever design is used will support that. If either of you (or anyone else!) has any other suggestions as to things I should be thinking about, feel free to let me know.
Thanks!
A short explanation of why transactions are useful. You can "commit" an order only after:
-the cart is emptied
-items were taken out of inventory
-the order has been recorded
If any step messes up, nothing is written to the database- which can save major headaches for customers (losing their cart without an order placed), and yourself with data integrity (it's only taken out of inventory if it's recorded!). Sure, you could erase carts after an order is placed, but that doesn't handle inventory...
I've posted links to this site numerous times when people ask about database design... but it's solid, and well worth a read:
[phpbuilder.com...]
Doing good normalization is crucial for manageable data, but with MySQL, some of those queries get far more difficult that they need to be. So I would recommend starting with PostgreSQL from the start if you are considering e-commerce. It is also free and open-source, however only runs natively on Linux at the moment.
If you are going to farm this out, do post it here before going to elance, so I can place a bid! :)
Any thoughts on the additional complexity this would bring? Just adding the discussion board (like vBulletin) is a piece of cake. Tying it into the rest of the site doesn't seem so easy. Thoughts?
