How are the BIG websites designed? Unique design for the same page? Or a script?

I think I'll have to go with Joomla, I was looking at some of Drupal designs and well they are not very attractive.

 

Don't worry abut the designs. Instead focus on what you can do with it. I've seen both good and bad designs, and to be honest, the type of CMS used had no impact on how good or bad they were. Only the capability of the designer was a factor.

And this is coming from someone who sucks at actually designing sites (though I have hit a few home runs here and there).

 

Design, in the larger scheme of things, is kind of trivial. By that I mean that design is a very easy thing to change, and there are many designers and coders here who can build you a very beautiful theme for almost any CMS you can think of.

The more important thing that you should be focusing on is functionality and structure, what you want your website to do, as Dan says. There's really no point in having a beautiful and amazing looking website that's easy to hack and doesn't offer you the functionality you need. I would rather start with a not-so-beautiful website that is built on a solid framework that offers me a lot of functionality, the ability to do all I need to do, and scaleability, and then find someone to take care of the beauty end of things, or even better, learn some css and such and do it myself. If you have a CMS you want to use, and then have a design in mind, it's a simple matter to get a coder to code the theme for you, but getting someone to add functionality or mod a CMS is not as simple.

Just my 2 cents. Whatever CMS you choose, choose it for the right reasons.

 

Yes, CMS is a very broad word. It stands for "Content Management System" which roughly translates into any script that can take some sort of user input and turn it into an output that other users can see (or can't in a lot of cases).

As other's have stated: You'll want to start with a pre-made type: vBulletin or IPB for forums, Joomla or Drupal for public type blogs, and Wordpress for a good all-around blog. Although, I have a friend that loves wordpress, but never uses it as a blog (he's always making gallery type sites out of it).


As for your original question: Their script is most definitely custom. So no, you wont be able to download it. But their script is written in PHP (as you can see from the .php extension on the pages)

 

I've worked with WP, Joomla, Drupal and even CMS Made Simple and I've never really found one CMS that perfectly fits any situation. I've often reverted to just developing my own custom CMS with PHP/MySQL out of Dreamweaver. I'm no code guru, but I use a set of extensions that make it easy to create multi-level user registration and access, as well as integrating WYSIWYG editors, sessions, cookies, page access restrictions, etc. Just check out my sig links and you can read about them.