New UK Advertising Website Coming Soon

17:25.48 - Thursday 21st June 2007   (Link to This Entry)

In between the building work going on next door and the phone ringing all day today, I've been putting in the occasional hour or so on a website I've been meaning to get done for quite a while. It's an advertising website, but the ads will be location-based so that you can search for all XYZs in your local area.

Today I was finishing off the actual input form that you'd fill in to create your ad. Because the same form is used to enter ads for five different sections, I have used JavaScript/DHTML so show a different set of boxes for the different sections. You select a section from the drop-down list at the top of the page and the form changes without reloading and losing whatever you've entered so far.

The user signup is (I hope) all done and ready for testing, but I want to get the basic version of everything in there first before setting my highly-trained team of bandwidth vandals loose on it. They can be very cruel over broken links, curse them.

There will be some mod_rewrite stuff going on in there so the URLs will be very SEO friendly, but as of yet I am not decided on how it will work. All of the ads will be stored in the same database table to simplify search, despite the different categories having different fields. I was originally going to split it all up for economy reasons, but found that the majority of the section-specific fields were either INTs or Lookups, so the impact was negligible.

This is the second version of the site after my first version was too limiting. I scrapped it tucked it away to one side and started afresh with a completely new database and design. Things are going.. OK so far, and I hope to launch the beta version in a few weeks.