Building a massive email list with zipcodes

OK. The first place you might check would be to search for "widgets" pertaining to the display result you are looking for. For example, Zillow has some widgets that you can place on a real estate website that gives someone all kinds of information about homes for sale, schools, retails shopping, etc -- all based on a zipcode, IP based geolocation or a specific URL.

An alternative to widgets would be to send your visitor to an external URL that accepts the zipcode as a URL parameter (i.e. index.php?zip=75087) and then displays the results you want. You could use a service like Aweber's optin forms to capture the email and zip, then send the visitor immediately upon signup to the external page with this custom information embedded in the destination URL.

If what you are displaying is more proprietary information and is unlikely to be available through a 3rd party widget, then I think you are on the right track with the database. You could set-up a new MySQL database using tools that most hosting providers provide you, then add some programming that would connect with and call results from the database to display on your results page. If your site is Wordpress based, you could just add a separate table containing the results information to the database that Wordpress uses. This should be a fairly straightforward process for a web programmer. Perhaps you could visit the Warriors for Hire section of the Warrior Forum and post a project request there.