How easy is it to add to a website page a section (similar to amazon I guess) where people can freely (without logging in) leave opinions and maybe give a rating out of 10 for something?

I use dreamweaver but have limited knowledge, I just drag and drop and fiddle…so my knowledge of it is at the most basic level…but could follow a dummies guide ;) haha


many thanks!

Are you wanting to allow comments for each item on your site separately or a general comments page?

If the latter, look for a guestbook script (can be file or database backed).

If the former, a database (PHP/MySQL setup most likely to be available on your host) would be the way to go.

Not something you'd write with just dreamweaver, AFAIK Dreamweaver only deals with HTML/CSS. You need some sort of serverside scripting (PHP/Perl best fit for this I would say).

If you want something writing, feel free to pm to discuss my freelance PHP/SQL rates ;)

Yeah it'd be more like 50 items + (that is always being added to) that people could add comments about as well as also ticking a 'out of 10' review.

It's for a non profit website, so not sure if i could justify paying for the feature, although I may consider it, just need to check into the functionality and wether I can justify paying for what will be nothing more than a hobby site.

Sounds very much like something you'd be wanting a database to back it up then.

Are the products themselves stored in a DB atm?

No, nothing stored really, just lots of bits of word documents i need to assemble, would me setting up an microsoft access database prove useful if I was to go ahead with someone doing the coding part etc?

would be very much a 'teach a man to fish' instead of give a man a fish haha....if i got it set up i'd want to be able to add to it at will without scratching my head (well hopefully!)

If you want to enable users to comment on products on the live website, you need some sort of storage on the server to store those comments and to link the comments to the relevant product. That is why you need a database on the server.

Or do you mean customers send you the comments/testimonials to hard code into the HTML?

Are you asking if you should be using word/access files online?

The answer to that is no.

Are you asking if you should be using word/access files online?

The answer to that is no.

nah I meant, would it be of use to someone for functionality/programming wise to have all the information I want in a database that they can link to/pull from (reading that myself I think i'm complicating the matter haha)

basically they type something and it appears right away without logging in or having it submitted for approval and all the ratings are accumulated to give an overall score...theres similar things on lots of buying sites such as ebuyer etc....but mine will purely be a information site, not selling products...but feedback is a vital part of it.

So you want visitors to be able to type in comments for each item AND give ratings (eg number of stars) AND give an average rating for each item?

Definately need PHP/Perl and I would strongly recommend a database backend.

That database would contain item records, where each record is something like:
unique ID
item name/title
item description

Then you have another table containing the 'reviews'. Each review consisting of:
product ID (FK ref to the unique ID mentioned above)
text of review
star rating for this review

When you load the product page for a given product (fetching detail from database) you would calculate the average score using the review table.

The information you are thinking of in your access database - that be the product information right?
Whoever created this setup for you would need the (product) info somehow, if you already have it in a database, use that. Don't create DB especially just to pass data to developer.