Or rather, devoting a new website to my Prince collection. 4 being a Prince "fam" & Princeologist since around 1984, 've aquired a mass collection of 250 Prince cover magazines from around the world (in a day); hundreds of fanzines; 13 tour books; & 43 bio books. Even tho do have every cd; cd singles; LP's; some boots (shhh!); etc., my main interest is in the paper items. would love 2 display my entire collection 4 everybody via the Internet so
'm writing 2 ask everybody's opinions & ideas on how 2 start and where 2 start this project. With knowing nothing about creating websites. 1 thing do know is want this 2 be searchable n every search engine so everybody will find it. Any help would b appreciated. Michael.

There are lots of search engine techniques, etc. These days, for example, google etc. are very "smart" and will find your site's content without much work from you, once they find the site at all. (You can help them with that part easily enough.)

The biggest effort of what you want to do is going to be scanning all of that stuff, and classifying it into a DB, etc.

You might want to just use something as simple as 'gallery', it's a pretty easy-to-use "photo gallery" software... check out http://gallery.menalto.com/

BE CAREFULL. THIS IS DANGEROUS GROUND. HE COULD SUE YOUR ASS.

HOPELESSLY DEVOTED OR NOT.

You could build a static web site page by page. But it would be a nightmare to maintain and update, especially with that many items.

Like Ben mentioned, it would be best to compile all the images and info into a database. That way you can present the information in a variety of ways quickly and easily.

www.hotscripts.com has alot of free, prewritten, content management systems that will pull the info from the db and present it as a web page generated on the fly. Updating the web site usually involves a few modifications to a few templates, and those changes carry through to every page on the site.

Find a website that you like, is easy and fast to get around, and inquire with it's webmaster. A lot of people are more than willing to share their tricks.