Website Search Program- Where???

[O-Town]

Hello everyone!

I recently had a site developed and my web developer said I need to hire a programmer to make a program in order to use a map searching tool I have on my site.

Check it out...

O-TOWN.CA : : Ottawa's Nightlife Entertainment Source

Is this really necessary or is there one available somewhere on the web.

Also, I am looking for a program in order to enter the data onto the site with ease and it categorizes it all accordingly; is there such a thing?

Thanks so much to everyone and I look forward to your replies!


Marco

[Fanatik]

Are you saying you want visitors to come to the site and enter stuff; entertainment vendors to go into a password protected area and enter their info; you to enter it??? you need to give more details - as this can be flung many different ways...

[O-Town]

Sorry for not specifying.

The website is a directory of local bars, nightclubs, etc.

When a visitor comes to the page, I offer a few different search criteria, one of which is a map of the city with different districs of the city that are highlighted and clickable.

When a user clicks on a district within the city map I want a list of bars, nightclubs, etc. that are located within that clicked district to appear for the user.

Apparentley I need a program made in order to have that done.

Check out the site:

O-TOWN.CA : : Ottawa's Nightlife Entertainment Source

Thanks again!

[flnazrael]

What CMS is that site running? Is there any kind of database? (MySQL, MS SQL, MS Access, etc.)

[Joshua Jones]

You can do a couple of things with that site - I'll refer to the techniques as static and dynamic.

Static
So when a user clicks on the map section - they go to a static page with listings for that particular district. So rather than all districts landing at search_results.html, it would be like results_orleans.html, results_ottawa.html, etc... you just list all the appropriate clubs on those pages.

Dynamic
Build a database and populate it with all of the clubs. Make sure and give them an identifier, like "area" or "district" to perform the query on. Now all districts land on "search_results.php,asp,cf?district=whatever", etc, where this page now queries the database for all clubs, or other selection that resides in that district. Now the page actually requests information from the database based on the users input and spits out the results onto the page.

Hope that helps!