Hello everybody, I am a final year student and for my final year project I have decided to try and create a price comparison website due to the fact that i feel it would be a good project to work on and develop my technical skills in C# and microsoft sql server 2005, since these are mainly the two programs I would say i have more experience with. Basically I want to create a website such as www.pricerunner.com, what i am worried about is will this be very hard or difficult to create, in other words am i biting of more than i can chew?. I would settle for a basic e-commerce site however that will probably attract a lower mark since every one will probaly go down that route.

My question is how do i start and what should be my first steps and if you can point me to any sources or books, I do know my way a bit around visual studio however i am no where near expert level, thank you.

Start with paper. Decide how you need to model your data, what operations you'll have to do to it (e.g. sorting, searching), etc... Design your web interface separately. You'll also have to decide where you'll get your data. There may be web services you can take advantage of, or you could just mock up your own. Then you can start coding...

Thanks for replying, in terms of how real price comparison websites get there data, is it from the shops or business owners themselves?

I don't know for sure. I think Amazon had a webservice that would supply XML data, but I don't know if it was public or if you had to be one of their partners (or whatever they call 'em). That's just what we used at my school. Don't know about other places either.

I hope this site will be of help: http://www.asp.net/learn/data-access/

Some business owners create their own price list and store it in their own servers. They have researchers who do the task of updating their site with the latest prices. Getting access to someones data means asking the owner's permission to give you access to their database. If they do permit you, then you must think of a way to get that information into your page. You can use Web Services to extract information from their database if you like.

Do your paperwork such as the analysis including all your Dataflow Diagrams, Data Dictionary, ERD etc... first and it will make things a lot easier qwhen you start coding

Thank you all for your responses, i appreciate it very much, and it has allowed me to get the ball rolling, right now i am doing a bit more research, and i have started looking into creating and modelling the database. In terms of the tables in the database how many do you reckon i will need, from what i have done so far i have a table which contains the companies details e.g company_ID, company name, address, website link, contact. However since the mock companies will be stocking different products (e.g credit card, cars), will it be advisable to have a table with product categories, thank you once again for all the replies.

yes it would because then you could be crafty and make it so e.g computer equiptment had amounrt of ram etc... whereas cars had things like MPG etc...

Hi Jbennet, thanks so much for your responses so far, do you think i would need any other tables?