Helllo,

Some friend of mine (adults, mind you) own a tire shop and they asked me to make a website for their buisness. And I have no clue if I need anything other than basic html, css, etc. So I was wondering if their is any other languages that would be needed. How should I go about creating the website?

They want people to be able to be able to see and order tires and rims of the site. I was thinking of using paypal for the ordering system. I know places like amazon use lot's of serverside stuff, so I was wondering if I would need any of that?

So, it boils down to 'what do I need'? presuming I need anything. Hope I made sense. :stickout: Thanks for any help. :)

If you don't already have basic php knowledge, I recommend that you learn at least a little since you will probably be using it.

This website has some nice php tutorials:
http://www.daydreamgraphics.com/

I think you should start off by creating a simple logo for the top of the page and use tables with easy to find and use navigation layed out on the side. Look around at business websites for ideas.

as far as the look of the page goes, for a professional site you should avoid anything flashy (such as animated images or backgrounds), patterned backgrounds, bright colors, too much JavaScript, or anything annoying like that. it should definately have a consistent look (make sure all the pages look the same [SSI or PHP includes might be a good idea]- it's really annoying clicking a link and having that page look like a completely different site), and easy to use navigation, obvious links (don't bury the "buy" button somewhere 3 miles down the page, for example).

you could use paypal for ordering, but it just doesn't look very professional. a better way to do it would probably be to use PHP.

if there are a lot of different products, you may also want to consider MySQL for storing product information, and have PHP pages for getting the information based on a product ID- that way, you wouldn't need to create a static HTML page for each product and deal with changing links and all that if you need to add/remove a product.

Also:

Keep the page background white, text black. I mean, think about it - how many professional sites do you see multicolor that look good?

PHP/Perl for ordering system.

Frames, JS, Music, Colors, etc are a bad idea. Don't over do the site with images either. Keep everything consistant. Basically, If the site is boring looking, you're doing everything correctly.

Keep the buy/order button easy to access. Companies don't want to loose money to non-easy to access devices.