Novice question about building a program

Question

I'm interested in doing a start-up website that would feature a program that would allow me to update data on a daily basis that would alter projected values.

For example, if I wanted to rank the top ten family vacation sites, or public golf courses, or investment firms, etc... for a particular state. Each item would receive a value based on an assortment of criteria. What I'd like to be able to do is have the capability of making an alteration and seeing the results reflected immediately. For example, if in ranking golf courses one of the criteria was course conditions and the course presently ranked 3rd was having their putting greens aerated. I'd like to have the ability to alter the criteria ranking which would alter the overall value and potentially the ranking.

My presumption is that my query is regarding a basic program.

Is this a program that I can download and work on developing myself?

Answer 1

It sounds like you would need a database for what you are looking for, and a server that allows you to develop in a server-capable language like ASP or PHP. I don't believe there is such a program that would allow you to do this otherwise, though I could be wrong.

Answer 2

There are not any programs that you can use that will give you this functionality straight out of the box, but their are content management systems you can use that will help you manage a website (post/edit entries with no programming knowledge) once it is built without any massive amount of knowledge regarding databases and server side scripts. Most content management systems are free of charge and have excellent documentation to help you use them. I would look at Wordpress first of all, as it is used for more basic sites like the one you have described, and will also provide ways you can organise entries by a specific attribute, which is another requirement you pointed out.

Here is the link for Wordpress.