Techie question from a non-techie

The type of site you are talking about is called as ecommerce website.

The main thing involved in this is the Content management system i.e CMS. A CMS uses templates to control the display of your content -- that is, the way your content will look on a page. At the center of any CMS is some sort of repository, or content database, where the content is stored.

You might find this helpful: techsoup.org/learningcenter/webbuilding/archives/page9347.cfm
(in case you wish to get into details).

There are many CMSs available for building ecommerce sites, particularly. Examples include opencart, zen-cart and magento, magento being the best one(as per my knowledge).

@DEaFeYe that made me laugh, even though It didn't do much to answer the question.

@StingGB Before I explain quickly how its done, unless you want to learn how to program (which would be great) you should probably stick with a plugin or something because what your asking is easy if you know what your doing, but a headache if your just getting started. With that out of the way, here's one way to accomplish what your asking:

NIGHTLIFE EXAMPLE:

step 1) user comes to your website and fills out a form with different options. Lets say they entered "Pub, DJ's,Airport", under "Type,Entertainment,Neighborhood" respectively.

step 2) The data is sent to the server, which holds a script (which you would have created) that will most likely query(search) a database, based on the keywords entered.

step 3) the database searches for matching words. so it would look under a table called nightlife. with columns that probably said "Type,Entertainment,neighborhood".

step 4) The query would have been constructed based on the keywords that i mentioned above,so it would look something like this:

mysqli_query("SELECT 'ID' FROM nightlife WHERE Type = 'pub' AND entertainment ='dj's' .......LIMIT 10);

STEP 5) that very basic query would return up to 10 IDS (relative to what you searched for). Which are like credit card numbers. They're all unique. once you had those id's you would run another query that searched for those ID's in a different table (this could actually be optimized so it could all be done at once). that table would have a list of every option you could possibly search for. But you would only grab up to 10 of those, and there IDS would exactly match the ones returned from the first query.

STEP 6) from there your original script would just output the data on the page as html.

I probably confused the heck out of you because I confused myself a little writing this. But the basic idea is that user submits data - server processes data - script outputs data onto page.

Are you talking about radio buttons with an onclick redirect?

<input type="radio" onclick="window.location='yoururl';">

If you want to see how a page works, I usually right-click it, and select the "view page source".
Most of that on-page magic is done by a little library called jquery.

DB? Can't really say what's going on behind the curtains there. MySQL is a popular choice
for web sites, so here's a hint for you. But this doesn't really matter: all DBs (RDBMS) speak SQL,
so as long as you can talk SQL, any DB will do (more or less)

More specifically to your question, 2 softwares are "behind" the process of clicking
links and seeing stuff changing on screen:

• your browser (FF, Chrome, etc)
• some http/s server (Apache, or other)

Basically you clicking a link makes your browser send a "request" to the server
living at that URL (technically: the server listening to ports 80 or 443).
The server then sends your browser a "response", and displays it to you.
That's it in a nutshell...