Using Access with Dreamweaver for website data pages

[Jon]

I am planning to set up a website for a professional association. The
association will contain a couple of databases where users can look up
members' details and members themselves can add to and modify these. There
will also be a searchable list of members available for freelance work,
categorised and searchable by location and expertise. The site will not be
terribly busy - perhaps ten enquiries a day.

I can get the databases in Microsoft Access and I would like to keep them
that way. The association is keen to have the site designed in Dreamweaver
and I am happy with that as well. So my aim is to load anAccess .MDB file on
to the site and connect it up to the Dreamweaver enquiry forms. My questions
are:

1) Can I be sure that Dreamweaver will be able to do this? I have several
textbooks which all suggest that it can but none of them give examples or
detailed instructions. Has anyone out there succeeded in doing this and are
there any websites I can look at where this is in operation?

2) What do I need to look for and ask about in choosing a web host which can
support this?

3) Do I need Windows XP Pro on my home PC, as some of the books indicate?
How will that affect its performance in other areas?

Thanks for your help in this.

Jon.

 

[Mike Painter]

I am planning to set up a website for a professional association. The
association will contain a couple of databases where users can look up
members' details and members themselves can add to and modify these.
There will also be a searchable list of members available for
freelance work, categorised and searchable by location and expertise.
The site will not be terribly busy - perhaps ten enquiries a day.

I can get the databases in Microsoft Access and I would like to keep
them that way. The association is keen to have the site designed in
Dreamweaver and I am happy with that as well. So my aim is to load
anAccess .MDB file on to the site and connect it up to the
Dreamweaver enquiry forms. My questions are:

1) Can I be sure that Dreamweaver will be able to do this? I have
several textbooks which all suggest that it can but none of them give
examples or detailed instructions. Has anyone out there succeeded in
doing this and are there any websites I can look at where this is in
operation?

2) What do I need to look for and ask about in choosing a web host
which can support this?

Are they an NT site and do they support what you want to do.

3) Do I need Windows XP Pro on my home PC, as some of the books
indicate? How will that affect its performance in other areas?

You probably don't need it but it might help.

What you want to do is not difficult and there are a lot of open source
programs that do this.
http://www.hotscripts.com/PHP/Scripts_and_Programs/index.html

Dreamweaver can make pretty sites but NetObjects allows you to do what you
want in essentially a drag and drop environment.

There are also a lot of sites that let you build and maintain this type of
application on line for quite reasonable pricing if the hits are low.
http://www.intranets.com/

 

[Arvin Meyer]

Dreamweaver is not really a web server. ColdFusion is the server that
Macromedia packages with Dreamweaver. I have tried that package, but prefer
FrontPage/IIS to create ASP pages. Many of those who do more web development
that me do use the Dreamweaver/ColdFusion system. Yes it does work, and so
does an Apache Web Server. For 10 hits a day Access is way more than enough
of a data repository.
--
Arvin Meyer, MCP, MVP
Microsoft Access
Free Access downloads:
http://www.datastrat.com
http://www.mvps.org/access