[sdilley14]

Pretty straightforward question here. Most of the websites in the finance industry are pretty similar in most aspects. Similar designs, features, etc. With that being said, I'm trying to create a "Staff" page and I would like to loosely base it off this design here . . .

http://www.1strate.com/employees/

Our company has the uniform business photos, and I really like how it's sort of a business card format for each associate, listing their essential info. To expand on it, I intend to have biography pages for each member of our staff to sort of give it a more personal feel.

What I'm wondering is how I could go about making the "business card" template, and have the information inside dynamicly pulled from our database, rather than being a static design. We currently have a "Staff" page on our website, and the photos and contact info are pulled from our database, but the design and layout is piss poor and I'd really like to design something similar to this one here. Clean, simple, professional.

I could easily draw it up on Photoshop and paste each staff member's photo in there and have their contact info on there and the whole "card" would be an image, but we need to have the photo and contact info pulled from our database as our company keeps adding and dropping staff members and it would be a real pain to do it in a static fashion.

Not only would this help tremendously on the final page of our website, but would be a great learning experience for me on creating dynamic content.

Any help would be greatly appreciated as this is one of the final pieces to our website.

* If it's too much to explain here and someone would be so great as to join me on MSN and explain it a bit better...or maybe even email me some outlines, my MSN is sdilley14@hotmail.com

* I'm using DreamWeaver 8 on a PowerBook G4 incase anyone is wondering.

[registered_user]

It's not going to be easier to make the content dynamic. It's going to make it harder because you don't appear to know how to make dynamic content. If that's the case, I'm certain you don't know how to build an admin interface which would be required to make it easy.

If you're interested in learning, I would recommend reading PHP and MySQL Visual Quickstart Guide by Larry Ullman as a good primer to do what you're talking about.

Building a basic app like this is not something you can learn from one thread. It's much, much more involved which is why I recommended an entire book. Learning is its own reward though, and I wish you the best of luck with it.

In the meanwhile, I'd do it manually, and only worry about it until your company makes you one of the staff members that is dropped. Who knows, having to update that sort of thing manually might just be the sort of thing that your company might value.

[sdilley14]

I'd like to do it manually and update it myself, but our current site has it set up dynamicly already, and now it's just a matter of formatting it to look similar to the page I listed here. Basically making that business card looking outline. I could have the current IT guy (the one that set up our terrible looking website we currently have in place) help me out with it and just show me how he set up the page then let me change it around, but I'd almost rather do it myself so I don't have to take up his time with it.

I know what you mean though when you say it'll take more than one thread to learn how to do it though. I guess I'll just have to keep working at it.

[registered_user]

In that case, set up a single div with a class of "bc" or "contact" or whatever, and design a single card in html. Then it should be fairly simple to repeat that div as many times as needed on the page.