I want to build a website that can capture people’s various demographic data and automatically sort and store that data in a database. So for example the site will ask people to either enter or click/check-off boxes with name, address, age, gender, hobbies, etc. Once they enter this info, i will have it all sorted by these different parameters in my database. If later i need to find all women 18-25, i can simply “pull” it from the database.
So my question (several in fact):
What is such a project called?
What qualifications do i need to look for in a programmer (btw, is it a programmer or a web designer that i’ll be looking for?)
What is needed on my end? (my own server or regular hosting will do?)
You’d need to find a webhost that supports a server-side script, e.g. PHP and a database such as MySQL. Then you’d need a web developer than can program in PHP and write SQL statements to interact with the script for the form interface to interrogate the database so it will show the queries you want. You want somebody that can write a Database driven website or pages.
Like you, I’m building a site that will gather a lot of information from visitors via forms. I can do the HTML & CSS well enough I think. But manipulating the information provided from the forms is out of my area. I Googled “email form processor” and found the product called called [B]Email Form Processor Pro[/B] on www.web-site-scripts.com. It sounds like it might be what you’re looking for too.
Good luck!