[gmawright]

I own a company that impounds vehicles that are not properly parked, and I tow vehicles damaged in accidents. I am looking to give customers and insurance companies the ability to go to my website and enter various details about the vehicle (year, make, model, color, last six of VIN, date range picked up, etc..) and have this search the database of vehicles that we have entered. The information would need to be rendered on their screen and preferably have a built-in calculator (to calculate the daily fees plus the pick-up fee), giving the customer real-time pricing information. Could someone please point me in the right direction? I'm sure this is a very common request and I apologize in advance for my lack of knowledge in how to do this!

:-) All help is appreciated! :-)

[carters-site]

While I do not think this project itself is hard..
It storage of data in a database and then retrieved. That does not make it any less of a small project for someone.

I am not sure what your technical level is as far as programming but you are basically going to want to

Insertion
Build a HTML form with at minimal textfields you want to store into the data base the one you listed.
Build a PHP file that will take the form data and use a MySQL Insert Syntax to add it to the database.

Search
Build a HTML form with fields you would like to search on
Build a PHP file that will take the search fields and use the SELECT Syntax to get results.
(Probably using the like '%input%' in the where for best results.)

I found this link has some basic code to get you going.

[wirehopper]

You might want to consider a content management system (CMS).

The CMS Matrix - cmsmatrix.org - The Content Management Comparison Tool