Suggestions for designing a app

Thanks jameslittle.
I just tried base64_encode and it looks similar to some other implementations from places like Costco. That is probably the way they implemented it. It will definitely be interacting with a database and built in security is always a good idea. Thank You.

Another more specific question about the applications overall design.
The customers will login to a dashboard at www.ourcompany.com/setupaemailer but the actual url the emailer will provide to send to their customers will be from www.clientdoman.com/link so would it make sense to build a RESTful api at www.ourcompany.com/ to process the it, that way we could just install a small script on each persons website that just relays the link back to our www.ourcompany.com REST API.

I may not be seeing all the ways of solving this design issue.

*edit* it just occurred to me a small javascript file could also serve the same purpose by masking our original domain and forwarding it. I could maybe even use Ajax to make the front end experience more responsive.

That sounds like a good approach to me. If your JS masking doesn't work out, maybe PHP/Codeigniter redirects would work too (unless you really want to build an API)... the flow might go something like this:

1. Customer click goes to client website landing page
   
2. Process/save/send email on the client website as needed
   
3. Redirect to a landing page on dashboard site with some sort of success token
   
4. Process/save/send email on dashboard site as needed
   
5. Redirect to "thank you" page on client website
   

In this approach, everything is being done by the browser request. The user would never see the address of the dashboard site unless they used developer tools to look at the network transactions.

I've also seen sites use iframes to do this. The landing page on the client site includes a non-visible iframe of a page from the dashboard site, and the src of that frame passes the necessary URL parameters to store in the dashboard database. But the user never leaves the client site in this approach.

Designer, developer and Diet Dr. Pepper addict. Messing up PHP since <?= $when['year';] ?>