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.