[thelist] Concept of website

[Eveline Vanhemel]

Hi all,

I have a rather difficult dilemma and I really could use some help on this.

At the moment I am creating a rather big webproject for one of my clients.
The website has a lot of text in it, like about 80 newspaper articles, a lot
of "very" long technical descriptions, a lot of legal texts and so on. There
is also a membership area and after some time, not immediately, there will
also be some e-commerce in it. There is a forum, a chat area and an idea
box. The only thing I still have to create is a search box. The search box
needs to do the following: you must be able to type in a keyword so you'll
get presented with a list of URL's as hyperlinks to the pages where the
searchstring was found. I already searched for some solutions how to do this
and at the end I always come to one outcome: wouldn't it be better, just to
put everything into the database. Parts of the site already make use of the
database. There is only one problem, "I think": the database is residing on
a server at an ISP, the database is an Access database and our website size
limit is 25 MB. The code I write my application in is a mixture of
JavaScript and VBScript for clientside scripting and ASP for serverside
scripting. What do you think? Am I plain nuts to try to pull this off or is
there hope for this way of thinking? Any comments are welcome, I really have
a hard time trying to decide on this.

PS. Currently the site is only in one language, namely in Dutch because I
live in Belgium so the amount of traffic on the site will not be "that" big,
but the plan is on the long run to present it in four languages. If the
client goes over on the multi-language site, they plan on passing on to a
heavier server and instead of an Access database to a SQL Server database.
The current server configuration is only because they want to evaluate how
this project will work out, and, for the moment, spend very little money
until they have an indication for success.

I am asking a lot, I know, but I would really appreciate your opinion on
this.

TIA,

Eveline Vanhemel
eveline_vanhemel at pi.be