How best to do this?

[Fafnir]

This may sound a bit weird, but how many of you have wandered through graveyards reading tombstones? What about the genealogists - they are fascinated by them. We have a very historic church - see You are not allowed to view links.
Register or Login - and a forum that attracts a lot of genealogical interest, so we wish to create a database of the graveyard for this and several other reasons. The question is how best to do this.
Data - Surname, forenames, dates of birth and death, age, inscription, location in graveyard, photo of gravestone.
What I'd like to do is have a viewer of some sort where the interested party can enter a surname and up will pop a window with the full details, including photo of the person(s) matching the name.
The question is how best to do this in a way that would be accessible to anyone with a standard program. HTML pages come to mind as one possibility. Anything better?

[Willabong]

Thats a bit of a grave undertaking.....
Seriously, it depends on what your visitors will expect.
You could do separate pages in a DTP package or even Microsoft Word, with appropriate graphics and information, print them all out, and make a sort of tourist book, keep it on a table or plinth of some sort in the church. You could do this quite cheaply by using a large Photo Album to display the pages, or you could laminate each page.
Or you could go the HTML route, with a main page providing links to each grave which would be on separate pages.

[Nick Peers]

Have a look at You are not allowed to view links.
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http://www.prestoncapes.org.uk/history/genealogy/index.php

.

They've basically gone down the online database route, although theirs covers parish records rather than the cemetery: it's something I've tried to do with my version of Support PCs using a collection of free programs. However, for that to work your web host would need to support MySQL databases. If it does, and it's something you're interested in, I'll happily pass on what little I've learned and the software I use (all of it free, apart from Access for the original database, but you could easily use OpenOffice instead). It's largely WYSIWYG too, and yes - you can link to graphics with it (in my case, I simply use a field to store the image filename).

[Fafnir]

Thanks Nick. That's very useful. My hosting service does support MySQL databases, though my brain doesn't at the moment. I'll get back to you if I opt for that route. My subconscious must be working on it because I woke up during the night with some ideas as to how I could do it and run it off a CD so that the church could sell the database to help its funds!

The simple route I came up with was a mini web site - an index page with a table for all the names, with each name being a link to a page with the details of the grave. That would work as long as someone with some understanding of HTML was around to maintain it. I suspect your route would be better as once it was setup, anyone who can enter data into a database could maintain it.

I think I am talking about dynamic web sites, which shows my level of knowledge? At least I have helpers who are gathering the data - I just need to learn how to present it.

[Nick Peers]

If it's any comfort, I'm not 100 per cent au fait with what I'm doing either! Probably doesn't help that I get so far, then decide I can do the database differently, which throws everything up in the air!

At the moment, I'm settling for a less demanding task - if you go to You are not allowed to view links.
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http://www.highlandera-z.co.uk

you'll see there's an episode guide there. At present every single episode is on its own dedicated page. That means if I wanted to redesign the site, I'll have to redesign every single page. As you guessed, separating the content (database) from the design (HTML pages) simplifies everything, as someone can maintain the database side of things.

DBQwikSite (You are not allowed to view links.
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http://www.dbqwiksite.com

) enables you to let the program worry about the main structure of the web site: front page, index page, details page, etc. You can then concentrate on the design, either by using one of the pre-selected templates, or - if you're stupid like me - by experimenting with CSS files and your own HTML.

I also uses an Access-MySQL converter, which again does all the hard work of translating a database from Access format to MySQL (it'll also upload it to your web space too). I can point you in the direction of a freebie - BullZip Access-MySQL Converter (You are not allowed to view links.
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http://www.bullzip.com/products/a2m/info.php

) - for that too.

Hmm, I keep meaning to document the exact procedure - it's one of those things that makes perfect sense once you've worked your way through it. I'm thinking of pitching such a tutorial/project to PC Plus - I'll let you know if I get round to it. Maybe we could use your site as the template for the design?

[Fafnir]

Thanks Nick for the suggestions and yes, if you do the tutorial by all means use my site as a template. In the meantime I am doing it the hard way - HTML for each page, though using Dreamweaver Templates make it easier. Have a look at You are not allowed to view links.
Register or Login to see what I've done so far. Only the Cremation Memorials link works and A1 to A5, and there is neither data nor photos, but it will give you some idea of what I am aiming for.

[Fafnir]

I was looking at You are not allowed to view links.
Register or Login where there is a tutorial on Dynamic web sites. For those of you not familiar with it, Lynda.com is an excellent education site with a huge number of video tutorials. The down side is that it is expensive, but you can look at the first 4 lessons of each course free.
Anyway, the link above takes you to a Dreamweaver course and the first lesson is a very good explanation and demonstration of a dynamic web site at work. For my purposes I can see how I could produce a database which could be used to find not only a particular grave, but also be a useful tool for finding other facts based on ages, dates, etc. from it.
Looking at the long term, I should do the course and learn how to do it properly, but as a quick way forward I will also have a look at dbqwicksite to see if that would be an easier way than the HTML coding I am currently playing with.

[Nick Peers]

Sounds like Dreamweaver offers similar functionality to DBQwikSite. If you've already got Dreamweaver, you'll probably find that's the best way to go...

[Fafnir]

Unfortunately I have found my hosting service Your-Name-Here (which I can thoroughly recommend for the level of personal service) doesn't support Coldfusion, which links in well with Dreamweaver. Apparently it is very memory intensive so they haven't installed it on their servers. They recommend PHP which I gather is harder to learn but is free!

Anyway. I'll keep you informed as to how I get on.

[Nick Peers]

Ah! PHP is what DBQwikSite creates - it can be a little fiddly if you start editing by hand, but I've found it reasonably straightforward stealing - ahem, borrowing - code from other web sites for the bits I need. You can mix and match HTML and PHP in the same PHP file, which is what often happens.

[Fafnir]

Having started learning PHP, I can see similarities to Visual Basic which I was reasonably competent with in the past. ANd I suspect I don't need to get in too deep - at least I hope not. Watch this space!

[Emma]

Good luck!

The other option could be to link to Flickr somehow - using their tagging & searching (& photo hosting), as then you might also attract people who're looking for a particular name, don't necessarily know it's your graveyard they're buried in.

[Nick Peers]

Good luck!

[Fafnir]

I downloaded dbqwick last night and thought that even that is going to need quite a bit of study. Mind you, looking at it at 11 o'clock at night was perhaps not the best time. I'm too long in the tooth to find learning something new easy even during the day. 

[Nick Peers]

Aye, it takes a little getting used to. Sadly I've not yet found a taker for a tutorial on using it. It seems most commissioning editors these days don't feel the need to even acknowledge pitches from writers, never mind writers they've used in the recent past...