Developing Database Centric Website

Hey everyone,

This is my first post to this forum and am a total beginner when it comes to these things.

I am attempting to gather information with creating a database centric web site. It would be a baseball recruiting type web site with each individual player getting their own player page.

Ideally, each player page is generated based off a main page and data from the database (possible?). My initial launch would be in the range of 2600 players.

Basically looking for recommendations from experienced developers on best Database to use for things like this, as well as a web developing program. Also curious on what you think the server needs/capabilities/cost would be for something like this.

Thanks for any and all information you guys are able to provide!

Thanks,
TK

 

Go for something simple, like a LAMP-stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) - your run-of-the-mill average web-server.
To begin with, your page probably won't have much traction - I would go for a simple shared host to start with, but make sure you're able to transfer your existing site (upgrade) to a VPS or better when needed.
Of course it's possible to fetch all the content from the database, based on URL-variables, for instance.
What you're talking about sounds fairly simple, all depending on what you want to do with the site. What you said, is basically just a page fetching (more or less) static information from a database (info about the players) - I'm assuming you might want to have statistics about them as well, which will change over time, of course, so what you need to take into account is database design, and how you're going to update the information as needed.
Remember that tables are your friend (most of the time) - by that I mean that you should make sure that you have separate tables for separate stuff, and link them via IDs and such. For instance you'd have one player-table, on (or more) statistics tables, one for users of the site (if that's something you're planning on) etc. etc.

 

Thanks for the follow-up Popsicle. Which LAMP-stack do you recommend? I know SQL has been utilized a lot within the baseball industry and heard good things about it, but wanted to make sure it was highly valued on the developer side as well.

This would be developed to work with a market leader within the baseball industry, so I anticipate there will be heavy usage upon launch (whenever that may be, assuming a couple years down the line given my inexperience). Would it be better to be prepared for a VPS host?

Right, I am looking at a table of players to go with bio information (height, weight, travel team, etc.), then couple that with stats from our events (updated at conclusion of the events) as well as scouting information (updated a couple weeks after the conclusion of the event).

This page would also have 1 or 2 videos we would upload (likely around a minute long per event) to live on the site. I am sure this drives up server costs pretty substantially. Have also been kicking around the idea of having users the ability to upload videos to their own profiles, which complicates things on the developing side.

That is basically the vision at this point. I guess another follow-up would be if we decided to outsource the development, what would that cost potentially look like?