Database Driven IT Training Website

We are looking to redesign the website of an IT training company, which is currently very down at heel.

Look and Feel

There's little in the way of strong branding for the company (and we'll need a clean break from the current site) so you'll have a lot of freedom and flexibility here. As an IT training firm the site will need to appear professional, but also approachable.

Back End

The company themselves outsource delivery of their training to another provider, so all of the course information is supplied to the company as a csv file which can be accessed through a web browser. It will be necessary to drag this information into a database to power the website.

Pages

As a rough guide the pages required for the site will be as follows. I've made a

Pages for:
Home
Search
Product
Booking
News
About Us
Get in Touch

Hub Pages for:
Vendors (e.g. Microsoft)
Products (e.g. Exchange)
Locations (e.g. Manchester)
Training Locations (e.g. London)
Topics (e.g. Performance Management Training)
Job Roles (e.g. Programmer)

The most challenging page will probably be the Search page. this will require some easy method of allowing customers to quickly find the right course based on a number of criteria - possibly through filters down one side of the page.

The product page (ie the page for each individual course) should be relatively easy to code but very important to get right.

For the booking page there is no requirement for online payment or any kind of user account process, simply that the booking form prepopulates itself with the available information from the preceding course product page.

The hub pages will be primarily for search, and a mixture of copy and dynamic information on the courses. It would probably be easiest to create a single template for this and store all the copy for each page in the website database.


I have no specific preference over the technology used, but would be anticipating either php or .net

Obviosuly prior experience of designing and delivering these kinds of websites will greatly help your cause, as will experience of Ajax and related technologies to help crack the search functionality.