Hi Blossom and welcome!

So do you want to create a forum or a website? My recommendation is to create your website about fish first because as I've learned from this forum, it's easier to get traffic to a website than a forum.

So first you need to build a big content site of tropical fish so people can begin to find you in Google, etc. THEN you can direct that traffic to your forum later. You should never start a site by building a forum. It's very difficult to make them popular if you don't already have the traffic. As Lisa said once, this is her 3rd or 4th attempt at a forum and she realized the others failed because she didn't have enough traffic.

As far as building your site you need two things a domain and a web host. You can get a domain anywhere between $7 and $10/year and then you need to pay for hosting. Hosting is a monthly cost ($5 and $10/year) I use godaddy.com. So those are your two costs upfront.

Then you are going to need some software to actually build your pages (unless you code HTML yourself and since you are a beginner I would highly recommend you buy software) I just got Dreamweaver and I'm playing around with that. Many people on this forum have recommended it.

Then when you're ready to publish your site you can save it to the web through Dreamweaver.

And as far as that Badmans.com site, you can get that design easily by going to the page and right clicking your mouse and saying "View Source" or "View Page Source" and copy the code. Paste that code into your web page software and edit the text accordingly. It's a great way to learn about design and a quick way to get the design you want.

I'm sort of a newbie too so I hope that helps. Maybe some more seasoned vets can give you more specific advice. Good luck!