Hello Janine.

First let me say that I appreciate the advanced training for Dreamweaver CS2.

I just upgraded to CS3 and will delay the CS4 until later.

I have a “tiger by the tail” in my newest project. My idea is to create an International Search directory, including a CMS module (programmed by others) whereby we have included a mapping solution similar to what “googlemaps” uses. Except the maps are not Naveteqs. . . not that it has anything to do with my main question.

The main concern is that we are going to have a landing page according to every search down to a city or town view for all the cities and towns in the world. I have not even calculated how many landing pages this is, but it is becoming a concern!

Each landing page will have a directory for a class of “thing,” a photo area and content area for information regarding the particulars to the class. A map will correspond on the right side area that is almost the entire visible height of a standard screen.

The gist of this is to provide the opportunity for one “banner skyscraper” ad on each page.

I visualize thousands upon thousands of landing pages and thousands and thousands of banner ads to have to keep track of.

The “site logo banner” will remain constant throughout the pages as will the horizontal navigation bar.

Is there any advice as to what training I could purchase? I do not know php or java or any coding skills. I have been designing in “design” view only.

Best regards,
Steve V.

Hi, Steve,

What you describe can only be efficiently created as a dynamic Web site, using PhP or ASP.NET or ColdFusion or a similar technology.

One of the advantages is that you don’t create a separate landing page for each city or town; you create one template (sometimes called a Master page) and then display content from the database for each city dynamically. In that way, one page design can be used millions of times, displaying different words, a different map, even different ads, each time.

This is a much more complex kind of site to create than I cover in my CS3 Essentials video, but if you are to pull off the site you describe you will definitely need help from experienced programmers. You may also want to consider using one of the Content Management Systems (CMS) already popular on the Web. Many can be customized, and using an existing CMS can save you lots of programming time.

Here are a couple you may want to consider: www.Joomla.com and www.Drupal.org. You would have to customize these to create your own site, but many people specialize in doing so and the rates are often much more reasonable than creating an entirely new system from scratch.

Hope that helps and I wish you all the best,
Janine

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