Creating an interactive educational website

Abbeylady

Hi,
Im new to Boards, so I hope I put this in the right place!

I have an idea for an educational website and I am wondering how difficult is it to create a webpage that is interactive? Any advice on what programs to use. I have little knowledge of creating a webpage but I want to learn how. Also would it be expensive to hire someone to create it either.

Any tips or pointers would be a great help. Thanks in Advance!

Abbeylady

donal.hunt

This might be better suited for the "Technology & Internet > Software and Web Development > Development" area...

Not clear what your niche is but you may want to look at some of the existing opensource education webtools that exist (a google search will find many more):

• https://moodle.org/
• http://opensource.efrontlearning.net/
• http://www.ilias.de/

These would require a server connected to the Internet. These days you would probably use something like Amazon's EC2 or Google Cloud Platform to create a VM (virtual machine) that you could run your software on. There are lots of guides out there (e.g. http://tomoconnor.eu/blogish/step-by-step-aws-ec2-tutorial/#.VhRcT3UViko ) that can help you explore. Most providers have "getting started" guides you can follow (and combine with other guides) to piece together a solution.

If you wanted to write a solution from scratch, then you would need to learn a programming language and probably a framework for that language. Frameworks are designed to let you focus on the logic / functionality of your solution without having to worry about common things like authentication, security, reporting, etc. Examples would by Django for Python, CakePHP or Zend for PHP.

Hope that helps!