A little help...

Heisenberg.

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democrates

Depends on your timeframe, gut reaction is get someone experienced on board.

At the moment you've got like the panels of a car on the chassis, but no engine, transmission, brakes, electrics. What's left to be done is a bit more than "tidy it all up", in fact the vast bulk of the work remains.

The skills required to complete take quite some time to acquire, if you're in no rush then take your time and enjoy that for a year or two.

Rather than reinvent the wheel you may want to look at using a prefab like drupal et al with a module for classified ads. But again, an experienced person will be much faster than a first-timer. /2c

ecaf

Hi
My advice to you would be to try and finish it yourself using PHP (if you have time). I learnt PHP myself years ago for a college web project - which was an online ordering system. I managed to upload files to the server and save orders to a database + retrieve them.
Everything I needed to get started with PHP was in HTML Goodies.com and I found it fairly easy, despite being a useless programmer at the time. I think I may have joined some forum for extra help also.


Also what do you find hard about SQL? I don't really have any experience with any other databases, and for college I had to use MySQL which was a pain because there was no front end. Why don't you try getting SQL Server 2005 express edition from the Microsoft website - it's free and you will have a front end to work with which will make things a lot easier.

As for the queries, everything I know about SQL is self thought and mostly from Google searches. There is always some sort of answer around for whatever query I wanted to write. If you don't know what your looking for ask here or on an SQL forum and someone will help you find the appropriate query.


If you really don't want to finish it yourself, I'm sure there are load of people who will quote you for finishing off a website. I might be able to put you in touch with someone occasionally does work like this - I don't know if they finish off websites but I could find out if needs be.

heggie

be careful about getting someone to 'tidy it up'. If they will work with your code (describing yourself as an amateur) they may very well be too. I'm not sure many professional web people would take this on, as it could be a major headache if something went wrong and they haven't been involved from the outset.

edit: and tbh, besides the design, the expensive part still needs to be implemented.

Heisenberg.

This post has been deleted.

ecaf

I don't know if I can help you much. Mite see if I can dig out the old PHP stuff I put together from college. It's probably long gone by now though, and even if I did find it, it was a learn as you go along thing for my degree, so it mightn't be great.
I might be able to help a little with the SQL stuff, I use it a good bit for work, but as I already said everything I know about it is all self thought.

You sound like you might be reconsidering doing it yourself? Why not look around for a few more quotes? And see if you can get something more within your budget?

Dingatron

It might be worth your while looking at a CMS as suggested in another post. Joomla or Drupel may suit your requirements. Take a look at the extensions available for Joomla and most of them are open source.

http://www.joomla.org/
http://extensions.joomla.org/

There would be a bit of a learning curve but if you can tackle css etc it should be fine. Integrating your existing design may be difficult though.

p

Honestly, I doubt you'd save yourself any money by doing what you've done. If anything, I'd probably charge more for having to deal with someone elses mess. The quote of 4500 is actually quite reasonable, and you have to ask yourself, why bother trying to create a website if you don't at least plan on making 4500 back on it? Surely you would make more enough money yourself by spending the same time doing extra work in your business than trying to save a few quid on a website. I always say to clients that a new website should pay for itself. If you're not going to get a return on the money invested, then don't do it. However if you are, then do it right.

There are off-the-shelf solutions for online shops, if you want to go down the cheapo route then this is probably the way to do it. You wouldn't think you could build the build your business is run in, so probably not best to try the same thing with a website.

pauldiv

I think the price you were quoted was pretty fair but now you have ended up in a tangle. You may realise by now that web design and development is difficult but you have still to realise that it is a profession.

It takes a professional several years of education and effort to aquire the artistic, technical and business skills that are required and that is why they can pick and choose who they work with. They are also web savvy.

A profession is not the preserve of six gun wielding script kiddies wearing spurs so stop listening to all the twat talk out there on the net that tells you that everything is easy. It isnt.

Sure, it can take 2-3 months to cobble up a site that would look good. What if some nasty little bugger then comes along and injects an SQL command into your site that deletes everything from your database?

All of these little details would have been taken care of by the person who's quote you felt was too high. Too many people out there know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

andywozhere

I went through a similar process myself. I think there is merit to doing some of the work yourself. I did the programming end for my below signature site and then went to a pro who told me it was a load of cr*p and redid the whole lot. He was right, but I didn't mind as I learnt a good bit on the way and the programmer was good enough to show me how he did it the right way (at least the bits I needed to know). I now have a better understanding of my own site. It all depends if you are happy enough to put the time in only to be told it's rubbish and needs redone.

In terms of cutting cost, you could always outsource via guru.com or another site... just make sure you know what you want first so they don't go astray.

galwayguy22

The Scientist wrote: »

So i've hit a dead end in that regard. I guess my question is where do i go from here? Is it PHP i need to learn? Does the database have to be MySql? (I did SQL in College for a while and hated it).

I'd say give it a go if you have the free time and ability/want to learn as you go.

Do you have a PHP server to test your code on? I'd suggest getting something like this to test your code locally. When your downloading it make sure to select Apache, PHP, MySQL and PHPmyAdmin.

This will show you how to create password protected pages. It covers registration and login.

As for the ads part of your site, you'll need to come up with a database table structure. Decide what fields you'll need. ad_id, ad_title, ad_content, ad_image, ad_thumbnail etc.

End users uploading ads will use the same concepts as registration from the above link. Provide text areas for users to input data, send the data to a processing page, validate/clean the data, use an SQL query to insert it into the database.