Hi folks,

I feel like a fish out of water here asking such a basic question as my first post

I've been involved in web design and PHP for a while never needing anything more from a database than a simple repository for information. I've not needed anything further but I now have a task at hand which needs a little more thinking.

I work for a car parts company and what we are looking to do now with our website is include a search facility that will allow visitors to select the type of car they have from a couple of drop boxes on the web site and then a list of compatible items will be displayed for them to go ahead an look at. All sounds fairly simple but this is where things get a little complex.

In the wheel part of the ecom site the wheels will be listed with the following kind of attributes:

make (eg: TSW)
model (Venom)
colour (Silver)
finish (Metallic)
size (17")
width (8")
offset (ET40)
pcd (4x100)


In the car selector system you can choose make and model which then lets the system know the variables of for instance what type of wheels will fit the selected car:

make : Toyota
model: MR2 5 Stud
offsets: 5x114 et35,5x114 et37,5x114 et38,5x114 et40,5x114 et42
sizes: 15", 16", 17", 18"
tyres: 1955515,2054516,2154017,2153518

My question is how should I proceed with entering the wheel data into a database. At present its in an excel format file but as I've never worked on something of this scale I was wondering if I should be breaking the data down into seperate tables or if since all the data is relevant only to one type of car (one make and model) should I just import it all into the one table?

Once again excuse my ignorance, I'm fairly good with Photoshop but have a long way to go with databases

Kind regards and thanks,

Rikki