database, email and sms, any ideas?

[peterm]

Hello all,

I've an idea for a business i've had a while but with my limited knowledge have no idea how to impliment the website that it would need.

It will be an online directory of sorts where each lising has it's own page which displays some basic info. On that page customers can sign up to receive emails and reverse sms messages from that "business"

When customers sign up their info needs to go to a database/program from where the emails and texts can be send with ease for beginners. The info also needs to go to my own database so i can send emails to the people who have signed up and opted to receive them.

On top of that the owner of each directory page needs to be able to login and send emails and sms messages to his users as simply as possible with step by step instructions.

On top of that i want each business to beable to follow online instructions on how to be listed and set up their page for users to access, these need to be approved before they go online by myself.

I know it may sound a bit vauge but i don't really want to give away what the idea is, i think you will get the idea well enough from the above.

Has anyone got any experience on this kind of site or know any good people or companies who could build it at a reasonable cost?

Any help much appreciated.

The site itself would be pretty basic looking and just featured targeted ads to the users, the complicated part i guess is implmenting the email/sms and database stuff, this is where my head is spinning.

Thanks.

 

[aZooZa]

One piece of your puzzle can be solved if you use FastMail (FastMail: fast, professional email with web, SMTP, POP & IMAP access). You can trigger an SMS based on a variety of email parameters and they will also take care of your MX records so that you don't have to host the other parts of the domain there. Their bulk SMS rates are cheap also. I've used their system for years and it's excellent.

 

[itrends]

Have lots of experience of this having run multiple SMS platforms over the last few years and even being featured in some of the ICSTIS docs.

Anyway, the key question is, what is your market country. UK, USA etc?

That makes a massive difference to the technology and costs involved.

In terms of what you are trying to do, it is straight forward. Depending on the market I can think of a couple of providers where you may even just be able to API call the system / build off their platform which would remove much of the processing overhead and leave you with the database side of things only.

 

[itrends]

If your business site was a speciality site, you have a chance, but as for an open business directory, this business is not viable in the least.

I say this with your best interests in mind.

I'd agree with that too.

 

[peterm]

If your business site was a speciality site, you have a chance, but as for an open business directory, this business is not viable in the least.

I say this with your best interests in mind.

It's for the Uk market.

Thanks but it's not an open directory for business, thats an example i used to describe it, as i said don't really want to mention what it is exactly.

Thanks for the advice above though i've looked around further and found what i think you were mentioning at esendex, looks like it could be the answer.

Thanks a lot, now to sort the database stuff!