Hi, I'm basically a graphic designer with basic html knowledge, I have a client that wants to build a website for his business - movie props rental. he would like to take photos of all the props he have up for rental - about 1,000 - and have them in the website... he would also like that visitors would have the ability to search for a specific prop, and for that I guess that an internal search engine would be needed, right? what methods are possible to do this? and do they involve difficult coding, or there is a chance that I can do it on my own with some guidance? thank you!
What server-side technologies are available to you on the server this site will be hosted on? An internal search engine is going to require the use of these assets. Most of the ones on the market (available at sites like krugle.com - under "Projects" - and hotscripts.com for instance) will be using the PHP programming language and the MySQL database. If you don't know how to write PHP code and make calls to the MySQL database then you'll be best off going to Google and getting a site search tool from there (I mean the Web site proper, not the SERPs).
I think that the best way to do this will be use a MySQL (database) and PHP (scripts) application. You have to store all information in MySQL and then use PHP to get them to your site. You can find way to do this in any PHP/MySQL training
Just install http://www.oscommerce.com and it will do the whole thing for you. Including the sales and ecommerce side.