I am currently going to school for network administration, I havent hit many of my technical courses yet so I am still a pretty big n00b when it comes to creating a website. I am in the very early planning stages of creating a forum so I can have a little something extra on my resume when I finish school that may give me some edge on the competition. How much am I looking to spend on getting someone to design this site for me, when I say design I mean pretty much set everything up. I am looking to save up about $1000 for the whole project, is this an accurate estimate? BTW I am not really looking for offers right now, just some unbiased advice, when I get done with the first stage of this project and prepare to actually start building, I will be sure and make a seperate thread for that....thanks!!
$1k is about right, here are some expenses I can think of off the top of my head: Domain - $9 Hosting - $10/month Vbulletin script - $180 owned license Paid skin - $50 (more if you want a custom one) Paid posters to make your forum look active - $100 Small contest - $300 Paid advertising $200 If I were you, I wouldn't start with a forum.. They are hard as hell to get active with real members. If you had $1000 to spend, go invest in some websites, you would probably make a lot more money and have a very fancy portfolio of many established sites to show in your resume. Good luck!
We can help you, PM to me for more details. But our opinion is, creating a website may easy, but maintenance is difficult. you have to find out the interesting topics and post regularly. The greatness of the forum is that, once you get interesting topics and discussions, you need not worry about the posts and traffic, people will come and join and they will start it by their own. so the growth and traffic would be exponential when we compared it with an ordinary portal. Thank you.
make sure you are putting your money in right place with right people ... my suggestion is forum is not right choice to start with ... try to get some websites, etc. if you want to start a forum then use the free ones like forum software, skin, etc.
A forum is not really that bad to start with, it's difficult to start up but it pretty much runs on it's own . You must make sure you keep spam bots and spammers out of the way. It also attracts good traffic from the search engines.
maybe I will try and buy a small site and promote it a bit just to get a feel of actually running a site before I devote too much time and energy into the whole deal....great info guys thanks!!
awesome way tro explain it. you start the website, and then it starts running on its own. but starting it is the hardest part. you know, getting it big. as soon as its big, it will just get bigger
With $1000 I would first create some blogs and then buy themes for them and spend some money on SEO and backlinks for those blogs. Blogs are a lot easier to start with as against forums. So I would suggest first using wordpress blogs. Then after an experience of at least 6 months you should with creating forums.
i agree with the above. forums are pretty hard to get going and keeping members for a beginner and if it does happen to get big then you have to look for a dedicated server or a vps because of the size of your forum and that in itself can get costly. starting a website like a blog would be much easier to gain traffic etc a $1000 you can do a lot and start a site off right esp a blog.
Although $1000 is plenty from most small-average size design/developer companies, it's way under priced for a high end professional. Start a blog and post your notes, comments, papers, etc. from school and if the traffic and comments grow enough, setup a forum later. There are some really well known security experts who use the default Wordpress theme and have hundreds of comments on every post. It's all about the content, not so much the design.
Putting up a website may be a better idea. Best of all, you can integrate a forum into it, though it depends if your site really needs it. But if you want to put up a forum, I hope the following would help (although they can apply to other web projects such as websites): 1. Decide on what the forum/site will be about. Most of the content of your work depends on this. 2. Think of a name for your forum/site as this can also affect your choice of a domain name. 3. Find out how much manpower you need for this (do you really need to hire a coder, designer, etc. or can you get free sources to get your started?). 4. Set up a schedule for your site, from the planning stages, to the time you put it up, and when you maintain it. Good luck! - Ced