There comes time when your website tends to transcend the boundaries of mere brochure type looks.
There is a need to interact, to seem dynamic, and to respond according to your visitor’s behavior. You also want your visitors to go through a list of offerings that run into hundreds. Creating hundreds of web pages having a uniform layout for hundreds of products can become an overwhelming task. Besides, it’s not easy to browse so many products sequentially — you need a mechanism to conduct searches or create sorted indexes.
A saintly combination of PHP and MySQL can come to your rescue. Once you have created a database with a well-defined structure, you can enter records and use those records as refence.
Here you can learn how to create an SQL database and its tables.
Once you have a database ready, you need a form to accept data, and then a php file to put that data into the MySQL table.
First the form. Assume we have a file with an online form named form.html. Here’s the form of the file:
Once we have this form ready, we need to create the php file it calls, namely, save_it.php. Suppose the name of the database is “visitors” and the table in this database is “visinfo” with fields “name”, “email” and “city”.
In my next article(s) I’ll show you how to query your database and then show the results on the web page.
Amrit Hallan is a freelance copywriter,
and a website content writer. He also dabbles
with PHP and HTML. For more tips and tricks in
PHP, JavaScripting, XML, CSS designing and
HTML, visit his blog at
http://www.aboutwebdesigning.com
