[ALUG] Creating Customer Login facility on a website

[sagr]

Thanks to everyone who has offered advice about how I can set up a customer
login area on our website.  I must admit however that I am feeling rather
out of my depth here and feel I may need to hire someone to do this for me.
I was wondering if any ALUGers have had any experience of hiring people to
create websites?  The main problem I see is that I do not want an entire
site designed, nor need it's structure changed; I simply want just a
small piece of software I can insert into:

www.customerarea.suffolk-ancestor-genealogy-research.co.uk/index.html

which will display "Customer ID" and "Password" login boxes, then process
the data entered so that, for, example, if a customer signs in as CustomerID
= "firstcustomer" and Password = "firstpassword" they will be taken to:

www.customerarea.suffolk-ancestor-genealogy-research.co.uk/firstcustomer/index.html

whereas if they sign in as CustomerID = "secondcustomer" and Password =
"secondpassword" they will be taken to:

www.customerarea.suffolk-ancestor-genealogy-research.co.uk/secondcustomer/index.html

The webspace is PHP enabled.  I notice some ALUGers have suggested using
databases for storing login info. Well the hosting (which is with 1&1) does
include two SQL databases but these are both in use so none are currently
available.  As I originally mentioned: our customer base is quite stable so 
editing an ascii login config file by hand would not be a problem.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I should go about hiring someone to
write this login code?

Sagr.