Nick_Hope - 2:43 am on Jul 30, 2005 (gmt 0)

Thanks everyone for your replies. What a helpful and civilised site! All these replies are very useful, especially as I am probably quite typical of someone who has made a couple of websites the wrong way and now wants to attempt something better and bigger.

trillianjedi, thanks for the tip to mod_rewrite URL's straight away. I must get my head around those dreaded regular expressions.

Gomer, I hear what you're saying about building it stage by stage. Wise words. I think I will probably start with a couple of static pages plus the forum and go from there. I'll also work my way through my PHP/mySQL book as a good foundation.

vabtz, thanks for the Drupal tip. I have heard of that and will add it to the shortlist. Their homepage looks promising. Regarding forum software, what would you use instead of phpBB if you were starting a new site now?