I currently have been running a free hosted forum and am taking the plundge of buyin a domain and creating a payed for site. So I have some real beginner questions for anyone who can respond. I have never done anything like this before however I have been searching a reading many articles on how to about this. I am going to purchase a template to make things slightly easier. Do I need specific programs to do this project? If so what do I need? Is there an article that can give me step by step instructions to allow me to do this on my own? Am I way over my head in this? Can anyone go ahead and create a well built website? I know these are pretty basic questions but as I said before I am very new to this. Any help or advice anyone can give would be greatly appreciated. Thank you
Do you know HTML, CSS, PHP? For programs, you can use from Dreamweaver to Notepad, it all depends on what you like. You can search around on google for help. What kind of site do you want to make? What do you want to do with it? Please tell us more!
If you want to run a forum on your new site you can use the auto install function of your paid host to install one of the open source scripts for free. The forum won't have as many nifty features as this one does but it will do for starters. If I misunderstood what you want just post more about what you do want.
At the very least, all you need is a text editor, a graphics program, an FTP client (I prefer FileZilla) to upload your files from your computer to the Web server, and some knowledge of graphics, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and MySQL. Fortunately, if you want a forum, there is a very good free one available that I recommend (if you're going to pay money to get a forum script you might as well get vBulletin, but I'm going to assume you're on a shoestring budget here). It's a script from Lewis Media called SimpleMachines Forum, or SMF for short; it's available (for free) at www.simplemachines.org and uses PHP and MySQL. It's nearly as feature-rich as vBulletin, and is miles (or kilometers) ahead of just about everything else out there. I'd also be leery of the templates that are available for sale. Not only do most of them use shoddy (poorly written) code, but some also use images that were acquired (or are being distributed) illegally. Companies such as Getty Images and Corbis have been going after Web site owners for use of these images, so you'll want to be VERY careful. If you'd like to get a template, then I suggest heading over to SitePoint and starting a coded template contest in their Design Contests section of the Marketplace they operate.