Help needed starting new site and am clueless

[heiztdiz]

I'm very new to everything to do with website design and I'm sure I'm being booed already by many of you experts out there, but I really need your help. I'm looking to start a local community website in my area, where users can upload there own items for sale, post info, videos, rss feeds to local businesses etc and am looking for an out of the box solution that requires little or no programming knowledge. I have looked at open source solutions such as mambo, boonex dolphin etc, but they all seem to have a lot of bugs or require script writing to some extent. Where do I begin? I know I have what it takes to make this site a success, but I have been running into roadblocks finding the right software. Is there anyone who can point me in the right direction? Also can anyone recomend a good book to read for a fledgling like myself?

Thanks a million in advance.

[wheel]

Wow. That's a lot of stuff going on. Seriously? I'd probably do this all through a forum, using software like vbulletin and a custom template.

I'm no expert on this area since I don't do much 'local' work. But there is a local site I visit that does do most of this, and other things, all through a forum. The benefits of that approach are: only 1 program to run, not 1000 different things going on, it presents a unified approach to the user, and makes all of the various aspects of the site a local destination visually, instead of having 18 different areas that all act and function differently. And of course, you can get off the shelf software. You're up and running for < $100 :).

[heiztdiz]

Whats the address of the local site you visit, which you referred to in your post. I'd like to check it out

Thanks wheel!

[rogerd]

I'd look mainly at CMS solutions (add Joomla and Drupal to your list) and powerful community software (vBulletin is the biggest). All of these have many, many free plugins that will add some of the features that the original software might not have.

Nevertheless, to pull all this together will almost certainly take some coding knowledge. If you can't do this, try to find someone who can.

The other possiblility is to try to use a prepackaged community solution like Ning. I think some of your needs might outstrip what Ning can handle right now, though.

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, heiztdiz!

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com], heiztdiz!

[JS_Harris]

Help create a new webmaster from scratch? hmmm, I don't suppose I can just add water and shove you into a microwave can I...

It's a big order but if you're serious about websites get to learning about all of the open source software you can, wordpress and phpbb being a pair of good starter choices. If you go the route of paying for premium code you'll enjoy it but find yourself making changes anyway. With open source/free code you'll find massive communities exist to guide you when, and I do stress when not if, you get stuck.