Seven months, thousands of lines of code and a crash course in PHP and MySQL later, Nationwide Down Payment Funding is finally open for business.
This is by far the largest site that I've ever built, and the first database-driven site. Personally, it's been quite an accomplishment, and I have learned more than I ever could have imagined.
The site is hosted by a company in Florida called System Link Broadband and runs on a Linux server. PHP is used for the server-side scripting, along with ADODB for making generic database calls. ADODB is similar to PEAR, and allows me to switch to a different database if need be, without changing any of the scripts.
The pages are designed to the following standards:
1. XHTML 1.0
2. CSS Level 2
3. DOM Level 1
4. WCAG 1.0
Special thanks has to go out to Jason Perkins and Massimo Foti, who politely chided me into doing a better job of reading the PHP material that was available, rather than asking mundane questions on Webdesign-L. And also to Rudy on the Evolt list, who's invaluable knowledge of SQL was a huge help as I built my first database. Just following his responses on the list to the questions of others is worth the time. And of course, there is the book he co-authored, which is fantastic. I also need to give some credit to Mark Newhouse, who helped me fix a Mac-specific glitch with my CSS forms.