This is my dream and I need your direction

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1

I am about to start my second project, I have completed my first ever site and feel that I have got a basic understanding of HTML and CSS. I need some advice regarding what skills I will need to cover the areas I want on the site and just some suggestions on what direction I should take.

I am not going to give details of the exact idea as I think it has some real potential and don’t want to disclose it just yet, this is probably quite naive and I really hope nobody is offended.

So I want to build a site which is based around predicting the score of a key football match each week, the idea is when you come to the site you see the prediction and also get to know how accurate the site has been previously in predicting the score. The site will then have the following elements linked to this premise:-

Blog - Articles about the matches and other relevant information (both articles I have written and links to articles on other sites).

News – news topics pulled from other sites

Comments – Ability for people to comment on the blog

Log In – Ability for people to set up a profile with an avatar, so they can comment and also they can make there own predictions. Their avatar would show some info on how successful they are in their predictions and I could then do a feature on the most successful ones.

Calculator – Bit like a mortgage calculator that is on some websites (I want to be able to create my own version). People would type in an amount that they are considering placing a bet for and the calculator would then show how much they would win based on the latest odds and also how much they would have won in total if they had followed the predictions from the site.

Stats – Tables, graphs and charts will play a part of the site showing peoples predictions, this will be linked to stored data.

Adverts – Strategically placed.

Is such a site feasible for someone with limited background knowledge and could I complete it by the end of the year working about 5 hours a week. What skills do I need to learn? Are there tools/software that can help? Is there anything I should consider before embarking?

Finally would wordpress cover a lot of the things I have mentioned above or would I be better building the site from scratch? Thanks to anyone who takes the time to respond, this is really important to me so I am extremely grateful.

Dan

2

You would need more power than HTML and CSS for stuff. Since you mentioned wordpress, you will need PHP and MySQL knowledge. WP is built on PHP using a MySql database. I would use WordPress as the blog and news. You will need to know how to set up your own database tables, pull/push stats, and such using PHP, and SQL.

For the calculator, you willl need to decide if you want a live result or will the calculator do the magic on refresh? If you want it to be live, you will be venturing into AJAX aka JavaScript.

There are some graphing tools available for PHP, but I am unaware of how sound/simple they are to do.

3

Thanks Rguy for the advice, does anybody else have any thoughts as this really is important to me and the more info I get the better.

4

5 hours a week, 42 weeks left this year, so 5 * 42 = 210 hours total

So, that’s 210 / 40 about 5,25 working weeks, which is slightly more than a month’s worth of time in total

I consider myself pretty fluent in PHP and I’m not sure if I could create what you’re describing in that time (taking scope creep into account, there’s more to the idea than you’ve described), so I’m pretty sure that if you don’t know PHP at all it’s not realistic for you to have this done by the end of the year.
That is when writing everything using a PHP framework, which are not trivial to learn either.

Maybe with wordpress it can be done faster because some of the funcionality has already been completely written, but the specific part (scoring, predicting, etc) will still take a lot of work.

5

Yep, most of the work is going to involve programming using a server-side language. From what you are describing there will be a significant amount of customization involved with or without a framework or cms considering something needs to be hand developed to gather the live feed data, store it and manage it. That alone would probably take you longer than the deadline.