I need help with website development
Budget: $750 – $1,500 USD
Very briefly, my project is to create an online utility that would allow users to enter the modern geographical hierarchy of any village in Germany along with a year (between roughly 1600 and 1800) and have the utility return the geographical hierarchy that existed in the selected year. (see https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Holy_Roman_Empire_1648.svg for a taste of the challenge I have set for myself.)
The front end would consist of a series of drop-down menus, with each menu being contingent upon the selection made in the previous one. I have found open-source code that generates a drop-down menu with US states and then a second menu with a list of counties in the selected state. I have modified that to replace US states with German states and counties with "Regierungsbezirks", but it doesn't work because I am working off my C drive and it generates CORS errors. So my first issue is figuring out what environment I should be working in to avoid that. (My front end will have a total of 5 drop-down menus, which I assume I will be able to generate myself using the existing code once I am working in the right environment. I also expect to be able to add the box for the year by myself.
I have written the back end in Fortran because that is the language I am comfortable with. It is a simple program, about 250 lines long. I have also found open-source code that purports to allow the Fortran output to connect to the front end. I have not tried to implement it because I assume I will encounter the same CORS errors I am already getting. I am not committed to keeping the backend in Fortran because I understand that hosting sites frequently do not allow .exe files. Furthermore, the Fortran is not handling German characters correctly. So I need some advice on how I should modify the backend or, alternatively, I need somebody to rewrite it in a different language and hook it up to the front end.
Most urgently, I need to establish the format in which I should keep my data files. When complete, there will be literally tens of thousands of data files that the utility will need to access. At the moment, I am keeping everything in Excel and writing out .prn files for the Fortran to read (Fortran doesn't play well with .csv files). I already have a lot of those files and I don't want to get too far down the road and then have to reformat them all.
In the long run, the utility will be one prong of a two-pronged website. The other prong will be entirely in HTML and will allow users to see historical geographies with more context than a single village (e.g., lists of villages in each county-equivalent, lists of county-equivalents in each country, etc.). I have undertaken a similar project in the past (much of which I will incorporate into this one), and I am convinced that I can handle the programming myself, but my earlier project was ugly and I could use some help coming up with some design standards that would make it more aesthetically pleasing.
The front end would consist of a series of drop-down menus, with each menu being contingent upon the selection made in the previous one. I have found open-source code that generates a drop-down menu with US states and then a second menu with a list of counties in the selected state. I have modified that to replace US states with German states and counties with "Regierungsbezirks", but it doesn't work because I am working off my C drive and it generates CORS errors. So my first issue is figuring out what environment I should be working in to avoid that. (My front end will have a total of 5 drop-down menus, which I assume I will be able to generate myself using the existing code once I am working in the right environment. I also expect to be able to add the box for the year by myself.
I have written the back end in Fortran because that is the language I am comfortable with. It is a simple program, about 250 lines long. I have also found open-source code that purports to allow the Fortran output to connect to the front end. I have not tried to implement it because I assume I will encounter the same CORS errors I am already getting. I am not committed to keeping the backend in Fortran because I understand that hosting sites frequently do not allow .exe files. Furthermore, the Fortran is not handling German characters correctly. So I need some advice on how I should modify the backend or, alternatively, I need somebody to rewrite it in a different language and hook it up to the front end.
Most urgently, I need to establish the format in which I should keep my data files. When complete, there will be literally tens of thousands of data files that the utility will need to access. At the moment, I am keeping everything in Excel and writing out .prn files for the Fortran to read (Fortran doesn't play well with .csv files). I already have a lot of those files and I don't want to get too far down the road and then have to reformat them all.
In the long run, the utility will be one prong of a two-pronged website. The other prong will be entirely in HTML and will allow users to see historical geographies with more context than a single village (e.g., lists of villages in each county-equivalent, lists of county-equivalents in each country, etc.). I have undertaken a similar project in the past (much of which I will incorporate into this one), and I am convinced that I can handle the programming myself, but my earlier project was ugly and I could use some help coming up with some design standards that would make it more aesthetically pleasing.