SOS- Overwhelmed newbie builds website!

[DTD]

Hi'
I want to build a community website with the following functionality; member registration,articles, blogs and video with message and archive capabilities, periodic chat room and links to partner sites. When the traffic increases, I want to add a forum. I was give a price by a web developer of $10,000-$15,000. My domain name is registered.

I have looked at Lisa's site and Go Daddy's Website tonight? Can I build this site myself with the functionality listed above? What is the best product to use?

Also, if I use an off the shelf product such as the ones listed above or others, will I have to accept advertising? In my particlular business model there won't be any advertising.

Thanking all of you in advance.

[sequencehosting]

Originally Posted by DTD

Hi'
I want to build a community website with the following functionality; member registration,articles, blogs and video with message and archive capabilities, periodic chat room and links to partner sites. When the traffic increases, I want to add a forum. I was give a price by a web developer of $10,000-$15,000. My domain name is registered.

I have looked at Lisa's site and Go Daddy's Website tonight? Can I build this site myself with the functionality listed above? What is the best product to use?

Also, if I use an off the shelf product such as the ones listed above or others, will I have to accept advertising? In my particlular business model there won't be any advertising.

Thanking all of you in advance.

I have no idea how much this sort of website costs. That sounds very expensive to me but then again your looking for a myspace sort of website. That could be the right price for this task but my advice would be to contact a few web developers just to make sure the price is accurate.

Im sure you could buy a program for this sort of website but you will need to know html/css and php. Building this sort of website will be a hard task even for a confident coder.

For this sort of website you may get away with shared hosting (this is cheap $20 and under a month hosting. It means your website is on a server shared by others) but these sort of websites are normaly hosted on dedicated servers ($200/month and more).

In my particlular business model there won't be any advertising.

What do you mean by this?

[Rammuny]

I'm not sure if you could do this with any website builder. At least what you're talking about.

I'm a freelance web developer myself and 10-15,000$ seems a bit out of context for a project like this. But it really depends how in depth you want to go with this project.

Actually with Godaddy's website tonight plan I'm not sure you will be able to do this. Your very limited on that software when it comes to a project like yours.

$10,000-15,000? Seems still to high I'd definitely talk to some other sites before deciding to pay that much.

[James]

Not to throw cold water on your plans, just to deal with some realistic facts, you need to be careful. You have not told us a lot that we can work with so think in some generalities here and apply what you need.

First, realize that you are dealing with some fairly complex issues, not extremely so, but more than what most people start with if they plan to do much themselves. Without being able to do the code yourself and so forth, you are going to have to have an ongoing budget for services from others.

Second, and this may be hard to estimate accurately without a real plan and an ability to anticipate participation, just as in other business activities you need to look at operational expenses more than the cost of setup. A lot depends on what you mean by membership, what you are doing with members, and what kind of data you are storing and using. Also, a chat room can be simple or complicated depending on what kind of information is being shared and privacy issues. If you have the ability to monitor and fix problems yourself it is one thing, but it is quite another if you cannot and must have regular assistance from a programmer or data base manager.

Third, in any case you want to be very careful about the kind of programming assistance you get. We see many people using templates or CMS programs that contain coding they do not understand and they get stuck easily when problems arise. Also, a lot of programmers use older approaches with tables that get very complicated and are time consuming when it comes to making changes (time is spelled with a dollar sign when you cannot do it yourself).

You need to be careful to make sure that you can easily replace the people you have doing work for you, too. It is easy to get php help but not so easy to find people for other programs sometimes at a reasonable price. It depends on where you live, too. Some of these other programs have lots of bells and whistles but who cares about that if you cannot find or afford someone to fix you site when the original coder moves? Personally I would probably stick with php/mySQL for programming.

Others here know a lot about programming and the like. I am speaking from the point of view of business.

[lisa]

You certainly should not use Website Tonight for this type of site. You need a regular hosting plan that allows PHP, MYSQL, etc. Great advice James. I tend to look at it from the business point of view first as well. Your idea sounds great for long-term but from a business standpoint how do you plan to draw targeted traffic to make this site successful? Community websites are difficult to draw traffic to if you do not have an existing traffic base. This forum is an example. As simple as it is (no chat room, no frills, etc.) I had to wait until I had thousands of visitors per day to my main website in order to build activity up to this forum.

As far as the money goes, I don't know the going rates for programming and a lot will depend on what you are having done (hopefully others can chime in), but as James said make sure you learn how to troubleshoot and maintain all this if that programmer should happen to become unavailable. I've seen that happen too often and these sites are not like managing simple, content sites.

Not trying to damper your plans but just trying to get you to think realistically before you spend a lot of time and money.

[DTD]

Great advice.

My plan was to do a two phase approach to the site building. Phase one would consisit of posting articles, blogs, video with comments and links to partner sites.
Phase two would consist of the forums when traffic increases. Thank you Lisa for the 1,000 visitors a day number.

James you articulated all of my fears which is why I decide to post on the forum.

As far as traffic, unlike most sites, almost every potential member is public record with contact information. They can be reached electronically or through snail mail. The number of potential members could be around half a million. There is no community for this group and the knowlege is out there but very disparate.

Regarding advertising, once the site is rocking, I do have a different plan to generate revenue. If it doesn't work, I can always go the traditional advertising route.

So let me re-phase the question. Is there a way, I can get started with a no frills approach without spending for a custom site? For example, can I build a site with the functionality of posting of articles, blogs and video with comments with an off the shelf product and then add chat rooms and forums later?

A million thanks in advance.

[James]

First, I do not blog due to my time restrictions and the number of static sites I want to develop first, but as far as I know a blog program (and Wordpress is by far the most recommended on this forum) should do everything you need to start.

In view of your plans you might want to set up a basic (even one page) site and install your blog as a subdomain or in a sub-directory if you want to keep it altogether later.

Some Wordpress users might want to comment about any limitations they see for what you want to start with.

I would recommend also going to a good site like htmldog.com and learn the basics of html and css. No mater what you do, even on a limited scale, in order to understand web pages and be able to do minor adjustments and fixes you need to understand how the web page works.

[McKnight]

10-15k USD seems waaay to much, I agree. You should maybe try that kind of approach where you hire one or two programmers and pay them to customize a CMS for you.
I must mention Joomla here since I'm a Joomla lover Joomla has this nice and popular component called CommunityBuilder. Never tried it myself but it's supposed to be very powerfull and I think it's free. Most of it is free anyway but even if you had to buy it, would be 100 USD max. You just need someone with the knowledge to set it up, customize and maintain it.

Here is the link for the component and it's features: http://www.joomlapolis.com/content/view/181/37/

Joomla CMS is like Wordpress only more powefull since it's not that limited to blogging. JoomlaCommunityBuilder also has about 120+ plug-ins you can use for free or buy off third party companies.

The only money you would have to pay here is for a class-A template and to a web designer to set it up and tweak it to your preferences.

[DTD]

Thanks for all of your advice. I am taking a Joomla class next Wednesday. Joomla seems to have the functionality that I am looking for. Thanks again.

[cloee]

Well community builder is a good choice but if you are not experienced and really want a quick and easy community site built for joomla just go with jomsocial its not expensive as you think.

[DTD]

Thanks. I will look into it.

[jeff21up]

I am with McKnight on this one Joomla would be perfect for you, take the time to learn it and you will never have to pay anyone. Community builder is free add on and is excellent