how hard is it to create a website ?

Wilko_Dog

Wilko_Dog

Wilko_Dog

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Just getting into programming etc with my raspberry pi and I've had an idea about a comparison website , already checked the Internet and it's not been done , but was just wondering how hard it would be to actually pull it off ? I'm not interested in making money off the site, it's just to make mine and over companies life easier :) .. any help would be much appreciated!
 
it depends.

the basic design, html and css can be picked up easily. However if you're doing comparisons where is it getting the information? your site (database) or is it pulling info from other sites?
 
There will be a lot to learn for somebody with no experience.
It sounds like there might be quite a lot of work involved with your idea.
You'll need a front-end of the site - in HTML+CSS and a back-end to control the logic/calculations for your comparisons - probably PHP.
Maybe a database too (mySQL) if you plan on storing the data which you perform the comparisons on.

I think that the hardest part will be getting the data to perform the comparisons on. Are you going to pull this from another website? It'll be a nightmare if you have to do this by parsing the html and digging out the bits you want, especially if you have to do it across multiple different websites.
Once you can do that, build the website to display it nicely.
 
Thanks for your replies :) ... I know that there might be quite a lot of work involved and as I am a novice at this sort of thing I have a lot to learn! ... I was thinking of pulling the info from the other sites/companies, but I'm unsure of the process of doing this?
 
I looked into something similar a few years back and as already mentioned getting the data is the hard part, some sites will offers api that allow you to access their database while others will try to prevent people getting the data.

Looks like amazon might offer something with there web services

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/latest/DG/EX_RetrievingPriceInformation.html

And Best buy in the states, so I'm sure plenty others do.

https://developer.bestbuy.com

Another angle you could look at is web scraping, I remember reading about this and I get the impression it's not always legal!

http://www.garethjames.net/a-guide-to-web-scrapping-tools/
 
Never heard anything about web scraping being illegal, some sites don't like it and if it's a lot of info and badly coded it can appear like a DDOS attack though. I've written a few in Python, always great fun as I do it all from scratch instead of using prebuilt packages.

OP, what are you looking at comparing? It may be easier to pull the info then store it on your on DBase so you don't have to go off trawling for it each time.
 
It wouldn't be easier to pull the info in I don't think as the prices change daily and stock would be constantly updating ? Would it be worth my while writing to the companies and telling them my idea and asking for access to there database? It would be giving them business in affect so don't see why they wouldn't allow it :)
 
A lot of product price comparison is done with the use of XML feeds. There have been a few tools written to use the feeds published by affiliate networks, see:

http://webref.eu/affiliate-marketing-shopping-development-tools.php

I would say writing a price comparison script is at an advanced level of coding, but it can certainly be done if you're keen. The guy that runs pricetapestry.com is very helpful in supporting his product.

As others have said though, if the data is not already there for you to make use of, then that will be a very big overhead.

Rgds
 
Wilko_Dog said:
It wouldn't be easier to pull the info in I don't think as the prices change daily and stock would be constantly updating ? Would it be worth my while writing to the companies and telling them my idea and asking for access to there database? It would be giving them business in affect so don't see why they wouldn't allow it :)
Click to expand...
Unless you already have traffic of x million hits per day they won't be interested in the slightest.
 
You might find this website useful:

http://www.programmableweb.com/apis

It has information about loads of web APIs that are available from all sorts of companies. Have a search and see if the industry you're interested in has anything that might be of use.

If not, then scraping would seem like the obvious route
 
Wilko_Dog said:
It would be giving them business in affect so don't see why they wouldn't allow it :)
Click to expand...

If they don't already have an api setup for you to use then you probably won't get anywhere. It wouldn't be that they don't want you to access their prices just that there could be a lot of development work for them to allow you in. They might have a single database which holds all their stock and prices but also customer details too. They'd need to create a way for you to access the prices and nothing else.

The development costs would be bigger than the additional sales unless you can show that you'll direct a lot of traffic to them.
 
touch said:
If they don't already have an api setup for you to use then you probably won't get anywhere. It wouldn't be that they don't want you to access their prices just that there could be a lot of development work for them to allow you in. They might have a single database which holds all their stock and prices but also customer details too. They'd need to create a way for you to access the prices and nothing else.

The development costs would be bigger than the additional sales unless you can show that you'll direct a lot of traffic to them.
Click to expand...

I see what you mean, thanks for the replies, I'll have to see if there api's are available first then :)
 
This is html5 website code.

Code: 
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Title of the document</title>
</head>

<body>
The content of the document......
</body>

</html>

It's that easy. Get your self some hosting and a domain name.
 
jsmoke said:
This is html5 website code.

Code: 
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Title of the document</title>
</head>

<body>
The content of the document......
</body>

</html>

It's that easy. Get your self some hosting and a domain name.
Click to expand...

Not quite...

Now write some complex comparison algorithms in your preferred language.
 
jsmoke said:
This is html5 website code.

Code: 
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Title of the document</title>
</head>

<body>
The content of the document......
</body>

</html>

It's that easy. Get your self some hosting and a domain name.
Click to expand...

I like the clean minimalist design. Very user friendly.
 
xbenjiiman said:
Not quite...

Now write some complex comparison algorithms in your preferred language.
Click to expand...

What the heck are complex comparison algorithms, if your talking about using a couple of javascript libraries then woopedoo, use them, call a few functions. It's hardly writing a game engine in c++ is it..

OP: there are a LOT of self obsessed idiots in the programming world, I make a good living and I don't claim to be an expert in programming and as far as I can see, all the so called programming gurus will tell you the same thing. If you can deliver a product that suits peoples needs then by all means deliver it.

I will never understan these people that proclaim to be
 
jsmoke said:
What the heck are complex comparison algorithms, if your talking about using a couple of javascript libraries then woopedoo, use them
Click to expand...

Wouldn't life be so much easier if there was a javascript library for every task you wanted to perform :cool:
 
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