Hi everyone,
I run a large website called MovieSounds.com and I really need some help in getting this site overhauled.
To briefly overview what the site does, it allows visitors to download audio files (i.e. movie dialogue). I started this years ago as a hobby, and now the site has grown to the point where I have to do something to reduce the amount of maintenance on it.
The site is essentially a bandwidth hog. It kicks out over 3GB a day in sound clips. And all of it's pages are html, with no CSS or asp, or anything.
The site is also badly in need of a facelift. It's a dinosaur as far as site design is concerned. If it looks as if each page has a different design, it's because each change I want to make to the site, I have to do to each page individually...and there's over 70 pages on the site...lot more manual work than I have time for.
This is what I need help with. I've done enough reading to know that it looks like a database driven site with php seems to be where I need to go with this. Problem is, whenever I have to start talking programming, I turn into someone like Jeff Spicoli who's talking to Mr. Hand. Get my drift? I have no CLUE how to put together a database...much less make it to where it's useful.
Here's what I'd like to do with the website overhaul.
Make the pages that feature each movie the same (template?) so whenever I make a change such as new banner ad code...I don't have to go into each page one by one.
Add a login/password mechanism (preferably including one of those "type in the code you see in the little box" things) to prevent anymore bandwidth stealing from happening. I know there's something like a non-domain blocker, but I'd like to start getting a better idea of who my site visitors are.
Place all sound files, banner ad code, and graphics in a database. - It would really help to be able to add new sound clips and the text dialogue transcription via some web-based entry page.
Implement some sort of on-the-fly, on-demand format conversion. It's going to get very crowded in my server's host storage queue if I have to start carrying sounds in 3 or more formats. This will make it to where I only have to store one format and let visitor choose format/sound quality
Add a search box
Create a "Random Sound" link. Ideally, this would create a new page to show the selected random sound and it's transcription....along with banner ads, et.al.
And I would be hard pressed to ignore the fact that maintaining the site's search engine position is a HUGE priority. Right now, if you type in "movie" and "sounds" in Google, this site is #1. Same with many many other search engines.
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Basically, this is a true website overhaul. I can work on the aesthetics of the site, plus a good part of the HTML work, but designing a php/mySQL database is waaaay beyond my ability to perform. I wish I could just hire someone to do this, but I lost my job three months ago and the site's hosting company just doubled the server fee this month; a fee which comes out of my own pocket.
I'm not trying to do some pity party thing...I just know that I need some help in getting this thing done and I know that in all likelihood, there are probably a few of you who have visited my site often, and would like to get publicly credited with designing the database for this site.
Bottom line...This website is essentially like a file server...like download.com. I'd like it to work something along those lines.
If you can help, please email me or reply to this post. I look forward to any help I can get with this....I appreciate it.
Tony Wittrien
MovieSounds.com
