Question for golfers/web designers

[12_Over]

So I've been running this annual Majors pool where each participant picks four golfers per major and total earnings at the end of the year win cash. I anticipate that it will be quite large next year so I want to check into the possibilities of setting up a website to run it.

Right now, I just track everything manually through Microsoft Excel. People will email their picks to me and I manually have to enter them into the spreadsheet and email the spreadsheet to everyone once all picks are in.

Do any of you web designers have ideas how I could just run this by a website? I'm expecting my first child this fall and want this to be as hands off as possible.

Basic functionalities desired:
1. Participants can submit their golfers through the site (pick from drop downs)
2. Site can have an Excel spreadsheet linked to track earnings and rankings
3. Participants can register and pay through website

Any ideas how much this would cost to set up? I'm not looking for anything fancy. PM or post if you have any ideas.

Thanks in advance.

[iacas]

You have a few options:

1) Use a site or service that does this for you.
2) Build your own.*
3) Pay someone to build it for you.

* Could be you just use PHP and MySQL or maybe you can find a way to get Google Apps (their spreadsheet thing) to do it.

[pixel5]

You're looking at having someone set up an SQL database for you with simple calculations. However what will be hard is setting it up with security so that each person would be able to 'sign in' and once they have submitted their picks it would not allow them to change it. Plus what if they accidentally enter it wrong? You have to program something to allow the administrator to go in and change it.

So yes, PHP and SQL is the solution, but it would cost you a lot of $$ to have someone build it for you and it would take time.

- Your friendly neighborhood web designer

[12_Over]

So howmuch would we be talking to pay someone to do what I want?

[pixel5]

You're looking at a minimum of $2000, up to $10000.

[iacas]

You're looking at a minimum of $2000, up to $10000.

Yeah, and the $2k solution would be pretty bare bones.

[stianvm]

If you exclude the payment thing it should be a pretty straight forward thing to set up. Its only logic :) Heck, im intrigued!

[12_Over]

4-5 figures is way more than I would want to fork over.

If I just kept taking payments by check and PayPal, that would cut down the complexity of the design quite a bit?

Please keep in mind that I'm a finance guy and a complete web design moron. Thanks for the input so far. Keep em comin'.

[nevets88]

Even if you get someone to create something for you for free, hosting is about $20 a month, an SSL certificate about $200 a year, and credit card processing will take a cut of every transaction. Usually you'll need support as something usually requires fixing or tweaking.

I did something like this pro bono for a non-profit and I had the services of a graphic designer and it took me a couple of weeks, part time, while working full time, using LAMP.

[injury]

something smallish like this any host with reasonable uptime is just fine. $20 a month hosting would be major overkill.