Here's the deal -- wife and I are looking to set up a website. By way of background, we eat out a lot and have recently taken on a role writing monthly restaurant reviews for our neighborhood association newsletter. Long story short, we've decided to expand our scope and post those reviews (and others) online, and if it goes well, try to sell some advertising.
I have a pretty good handle on web design and whatnot, but the stuff under the hood is a lot more intimidating. In a perfect world, I would want a site that would be able to do the following:
[LIST] []Host articles []Serve as a database of restaurants []Make that database searchable, preferably over a number of different criteria []Allow users to add their own content [*]Dynamically cycle through ads, and monitor which ones are being clicked. [/LIST]
I gather that these sorts of things can be done through the use of MySQL databases, PHP, etc. Although I'm pretty computer savvy and consider myself a reasonably sharp dude, I know dick when it comes to actually writing code. My question, to those of you that manage websites and have familiarity with such things, is how difficult would it be for someone like me to pick this stuff up on the fly, and/or are there programs that can bridge the gap between a noob like myself and the code that runs the show? Any resources you can point me to?
Thanks for any input