Let me start by saying that I am super new to web development so I apologize if this is a stupid question, but I have been looking around for days and haven't been able to find anything.
I am re-working the website for my wedding photography studio with a bunch of photographers in different locations and with slightly different skill sets and prices. I am currently using HTML, CSS, PHP, and mySQLi to build the site.
We are about to start expanding aggressively, so I would like to have our website do some of our work for us before the client ever contacts us. The general idea is that I want clients to be able to come to our site and search through our photographers based on location, skills, price and availability before they contact us to set up a meeting and book their photographer. So, I am setting it up so our photographers can make a profile, upload some general info and portfolio examples etc. into a mySQLi database. Then, clients can quickly search to find the right photographer for their wedding. That part was easy enough. Create a table, each photographer gets a row with individual columns for each piece of profile info.
Where I got stuck is the photographers' schedules. Clients start searching for photographers as much as 2 YEARS in advance and we want to make sure that client searches only bring up photographers who are actually available for their wedding date.
I have been looking around in here for days and from what I have read, trying to save multiple pieces of data in one column (which is to say, all of the individual dates that a particular photographer already booked) is a big no-no because then you can't query the data, which I obviously need to be able to do here. But, I seriously doubt that adding 730 columns (corresponding to one column per day for the next 2 years) to my user table is the solution, especially if we expand to hundreds (maybe even thousands?) of photographers over time.
Can anyone point me in the right direction here?
Thanks in advance!