Help Website Help!

[ramathorn]

Hi Folks,

Looking a bit of help with web design!

A couple of guys I know are personal trainers, they are sort of starting out on their own and are looking to put their own website etc together. This sort of coincided with me taking a bit of interest in web design myself and I said I would have a stab at putting together a website for them.

So far getting a hand of the basics and the site is starting to take shape, however they also want a calendar function on the site where clients can book time with them or book into classes with them online.

How difficult is something like this to put together? what language should I be looking at to develop it? Is it something that's likely to be picked up in a couple of weeks? I assume it is going to need a backend database of some sort? If so how does hosting work for something like this? Any help / pointers that could be offered?

Up until now all the design has been done in dreamweaver cs5, if that makes any difference at all!

Any help at all would be appreciated

R

 

[Killswitch]

Well, there are tons of Javascript calendar things available which could be used along with an email form to send appointment requests back to the trainers. If you want to keep track of what slots are busy/free and suchlike then you are probably looking at a MySQL backend and some PHP which is a little harder (but not too bad).

Calendars : A collection of JavaScript Calendar scripts, programs, and applications

Another option would be to use an iCalendar (or vCalendar) and then work with that. A good place to start might be here;

PHP iCalendar
PHPBuilder.com, the best resource for PHP tutorials, templates, PHP manuals, content management systems, scripts, classes and more.

Also, there are many free Content Management (CMS) packages available, most of which use LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) and are pretty easy to develop for. Drupal is a major one and Joomla is another. These have big communities with literally hundreds of plugin modules available for free. There will almost certainly be an "appointment manager" plugin available for these.

Drupal - Open Source CMS | drupal.org
Event | drupal.org

Joomla!
Zap Calendar - Joomla! Extensions Directory