My husband and I came across SBI by accident the other day and have done quite a bit of reading up on it the last couple of days. We are very impressed and think it might fit the needs of a website we have been planning for a while now.

We have a Yahoo group for our little town where group members post about things going on in town, concerns about the town, politics, shopping, and more. Unfortunately, it seems that we are starting to outgrow Yahoo and so we would like to create a website for our group. Here is what we want to include:

forums where the members can post about different topics. They can make their own threads a lot like how this site is set up.
local news
information about the town
local restaurants and businesses
advertising from local restaurants and businesses
google ads
and more as we think of it

The forums seem to be the thing we are having the hardest time finding. I have created a few free websites here and there for college classes, but have never done anything big like this. We want something easy to use that will guide us through the process. We are willing to spend the time and money to put this together, especially if it will make some money in the end.

We also have a few other ideas for websites and thought SBI could help us set these up too. Here are our questions:

1. Will SBI help us set up the kind of website I have mentioned?
2. I understand SBI includes the price for hosting and domain. How many sites does it include and for how long?
3. Do you have any suggestions of things we should learn before taking this endeavor?

Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions. We feel excited, but apprehensive about taking this step.

First of all welcome to the forum.

Unfortunately SBI does not include a forum.

To create a forum you need to register a domain and buy web hosting. Hostgator has been recommended by many members here.

For a small community forum I would recommend PHPBB , this is very simple to install from the web hosting control panel. Setting up the different sections and user groups may be a bit time consuming but is not too difficult.

This forum uses vBulletin software which is arguably a better sytem but unlike PHPBB it is not free.

If you have any difficulties please come back and ask questions.

I'll leave it there as there a few people here better able to give you the advice about SBI.

Regards

Bob

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Agree with a Bob. For a site like this you need to choose a regular hosting plan from a site like GoDaddy, Bluehost, etc.

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