Hello everyone,

Does anyone know how to create a web site data base? It doesn't have to be complicated. I just wanted to create a data base for my field of study: basically including web sites that would be useful for different areas of research. If anyone has any ideas as to how I can create one, I would greatly appreciated it.

Further info is needed and "not complicated" qualified. The scope of your desire could range from simply using the favorites or bookmarks features of your browser, to having a local Microsoft Access database of websites with search capability, to having a globally accessible web site supported by a back end MySQL database that scours the web and catagorizes all the research sites of interest it finds.

How many sites are we talking?

It depends (to paraphrase ex-prez Clinton) on what you mean by "database".

If you mean, "how do I create a simple list of categories and links to sites and put them up on a set of web pages", then you'll need a website design tool that lets you create lists & tables & pages and link them together. I can make some recommendations if that's the case.

If on the other hand you mean, "how do I create a website that's searchable by various criteria", then there are two possible approaches:

1) The records for individual entries go on separate pages and you provide a search capability that will return matching pages. Here's a solution written in PHP. You'll need to know HTML and some PHP to do this.

2) The records for individual entries go into a database and you generate the pages on the fly (dynamic pages). You'll need to know PHP and MySQL to do this; a more programming intensive solution than 1). Here's a book I recommend for learning PHP and MySQL.

Hello Vingogly,
Thank you very much for responding to my question. Actually I don't think I need anything all that technical, LOL I am not a technical person when it comes to computer stuff. However, what I want to do is create a "database" that will be used strictly for research. In that database I wanted to include links that will be useful for all areas of my major which is Criminal Justice. So I was thinking of used Excel, I could possibly create this " research data base". It will be a list of 25 or more web sites that will be useful for researching different topics in Criminal Justice. For instance, I would have a column for Forensics, and underneath that I will have a list of web sites, books or similar materials that will be useful,along with a brief summary of the websites, then so on and so forth. Hopefully this makes sense to you and anyone else that reads my posts.

Ah, that's a different matter then! The Excel solution would work... but you might want to look at these solutions:

Evernote - Collect & organize a wide variety of information (Windows or Mac)
ZuluPad - Personal wiki, free form hypertext system (Mac equivalent: VoodooPad)
WinJournal - Journaling software (Mac equivalent: MacJournal)

All allow you to collect a variety of information types, including URLs. Which is best for you depends on your style of working, basically. I think they all have try before you buy options (I personally use VoodooPad and MacJournal, Evernote is a bit of overkill for me).

Vasily