Hey everyone, I'm going to build a site for cancer survivors where the user starts with one question and depending on the answer they choose it will lead them to another question and so on until they are given a list of links that are helpful to them based on their answers. It would be kind of like a choose your own adventure game. The main topics would be covering disability, employment, and health insurance and the purpose would be to educate the user. I'm wondering what the best approach is when setting up the backend of this site. I would need to be able to update links and possibly reword questions easily overtime. Should I make a bunch of static HTML pages that they go through, or is there a better way to do it on the server side so it's a one page site? I'm an intermediate web designer who has done mainly front-end development, but I see this as a great opportunity for me to learn more.
It depends on how many panels you will need to walk the user through the steps, and the formula that you will use to select the links. A small amount of information and links could be handled with a single page and a panel that gets loaded and reloaded from hidden blocks of tex in the page or using AJAX. However that would not be very scalable and would be a problem if the content grows. I generally would prefer to keep the content in a databse which could then have flexible indexing applied to pul up the right piece and reference the right links. Then I might break things up to use category pages with the main content generated from the DB, you could then use the session variables to hold information need to generate the appropriate links at the end of the process.