Recommendations (database/search)

Hi all,

I'm new to the forum and I'm not a website designer (yet). But I have a specific webpage need and I may have to build it myself. I'm hoping someone here will have a recommendation for either a service that's already out there or some resources to get me started making it.

What I'm looking for is basically a database with a super intuitive advanced search function. Ideally, I would like to be able to:
-Input data into structured fields (such as County and Insurance Accepted) for each entry
-Search the records by a combination of those field values quickly and easily. E.g. click a large button to get a drop down menu for County, select one, repeat for Insurance or other fields on the same page, and see a list of relevant records - narrowing each time an additional parameter is selected - all on the same page with no extra clicking around.
-Click a single button on any record to store the information that the record was selected due to the specified values in the search fields: ABC was clicked with the information of X age, Y County, and Z insurance provided.
-Keep this data secure.

I'm interested in any freeware, paid software, or web services you might know of related to this project, or any website template or database software sufficiently flexible to allow me to build the service I'm looking for. Failing that, any tips you have on how to get started would be much appreciated as well!

Thanks so much for your help!

 

You can do this with any database, MySQL would be the straight-forward choice. It is just the database, however, so you will need to have a frontend and server-side code to connect to the database, and store/retrieve the content needed. Your needs are nothing special, it's just basic 101 database-usage, really. Having the right records show up based on selections done in a form is also plain, straight forward coding, the same goes for having them updated, or store a separate entry in a separate table based on selection and so on.

 

Thanks for your reply, PoPSiCLe!
As I mentioned, I'm very new to this field. What for you is "plain, straight forward coding" is for me mostly a mystery! Do you have any recommendations for front end software that would be best suited for this project? Or, if I do have to do most of the coding myself, any open source projects etc that would give me a good starting point?

 

You do not wanna do this yourself. You might be able to do it, but it will most certainly not be well coded, it will be open for abuse / hacking, and there will probably be other problems. Making something like this with ready-coded existing solutions might work, but you will still be needing specific database-structures / tables for the most part, and coding it from scratch is probably just as effective (if not more effective). I don't really use ready-made solutions, I code it from scratch, so I can't give you any tips there.

Personally, with what I can discern is your level of knowledge, I would look into hiring someone to do this. I would definitely not recommend you do this yourself, unless you're sucker for punishment.

 

Download PHPGrid free version from here: http://www.phpgrid.org/compare/ - you'll love it!

You can test drive it here: http://www.phpgrid.org/demo-center/

 

Dizzy how is the design going?? I'm new to the web design field as well and trying to build something similar and have been having trouble with it. I can build the MySQL database pretty easily but what I'm having trouble with is linking the front end (HTML form) to the data base with the PHP code.

Mine doesn't need to be super secure since it doesn't store any user information, it simply takes the user preferences and matches to what is in the database and displays the results (like a Nike.com, Cars.com, etc).