Dynamically generate thumbnail page question

[markwtaylor]

I am hoping someone here can help me. I have a site that has products for sale, but each time we have a product that is out of stock, or simply want to remove an entire group of items (say from a specific manufacturer), we have to manually change all of the thumbnail pages to remove the items and shift up the remaining items.

Is there a way to do this dynamically, say by have a list of all thumbnails in a file and a flag next to each one with either "Show" or "Omit"?

I am a real Java & HTML newbie, so any help would be appreciated!

[Cary]

To automate this you will need make your website dynamic by using a database together with a server-side language such as PHP or ASP.NET. This isn't something you can learn overnight, but it's the way to go.

If you have a choice, PHP is generally considered easier to learn, but since you use your site for selling things, it's probably already using some server-side scripting to handle orders. In that case, you need to find out what it's using. Is it PHP, ASP.NET (or just the older ASP), ColdFusion, or JSP. Then you can either learn the language it uses or pay someone else to make the changes you want.