Nick_Hope - 11:05 am on Jul 28, 2005 (gmt 0)

I'm planning a new site on marine life and I would like some advice so I start on the right foot.

My Rough Business Model

1. Traffic generated mainly from search engine hits.
2. Selling my own marine life DVD's, either through the site or through the sister site (which is already going).
3. Affiliate marketing. Specifically books, videos etc. from National Geographic, Amazon, Discovery Channel Shop.
4. Pay per click advertising. e.g. Google Adsense.
5. Other direct advertising with aquarium companies, scuba diving operaters etc..
6. Possible membership fee for viewing premium videos online etc..

What I Already Have

1. The domain (which is basically named after the subject) and a hosting account.
2. I have a large collection of my own photos and videos of marine life, all categorised by species.
3. Plenty of knowledge and enthusiasm for the subject. I am prepared to write articles and add rich content regularly.
4. Dreamweaver and some knowledge with it.
5. Experience building 2 sites but it was all HTML with complicated table layouts (ugh!).
6. Some programming experience, but not in PHP (yet). But I'm sure I could pick it up.

What I Know I Want

1. I want to have highly authoritative individual pages for the individual species. Each page will contain information, photos, and in many cases videos of that species. Users will arrive at the page through a logical hierachy for example: fish > sharks > leopard shark. So I hope to make my page eventually hit top SERP for a search on "leopard shark". I envisage building upto 100 pages quite quickly and ending up with thousands of individual species pages as the site grows.
2. Site search will be very important indeed.
3. I want a forum. phpBB looks appropriate for this.
4. I may well want a shop, unless all sales are handled by the sister site. Looking around I fancy Zencart (a PHP shopping cart based on OsCommerce).
5. A front page with news/articles and an RSS feed, as well as quick links to the different main marine life families.
6. Slick photo galleries such as incorportating "Coppermine" or "Gallery" software into the site.
7. I really fancy PHP over ASP for dynamic stuff.
8. Plenty of space for the ads.

My Questions

1. Is XHTML and CSS the way to go?
2. Should the whole site be dynamically written in PHP? There will be several PHP components in it anyway.
3. Should all these individual species be entered in a MySQL database to make life easier?
4. Should I be looking at a content management system to make life easier? If so which?
5. Is phpBB a good choice of forum software?
6. Is Zencart a good choice of shopping cart software?
7. Should I kick off with a template or build the whole thing from scratch myself? If so then where is a reputable source of suitable templates?
8. Should I build the whole thing around a blog? If so where to start?

thanks!