Planning your database fields
The first thing you need to do is to think what kind of data you would like to collect about the members. This depends on what kind of site you are building. For instance:
- If this is a model site, you would collect physical appearance information such as height, weight or eye color.
- If you are building an alumni site for your high school, you will probably want to have a graduation year in the database.
- If you are an organization and would like to have a place where you can post information for your members, you will want to save their membership ID.
- If this is a personals site, you will want to have their gender and what kind of relationship they are interested in.
In short, you need to ask two important questions to yourself:
Another quick way would be to go to your competitor's site and see what kind of questions they are asking. Thinking about database fields is the most important part of the customization, so you should take your time. If it is necessary, you should get a pen and a paper and write all possible data you want to have.
The last step is to eliminate the fields that you don't really need. You don't want to fill your database with unnecessary data that you won't even use. They will slow down your searches especially when you have many members.
Now you have decided which fields you will have in your membership database, you will determine data types for these fields on the next article.
