I’ve been thinking about creating a website for a while, with a newsletter and forum and all…been researching and feel it’s a bit hard. Is it? Anyone here have their own website? Apart from Brillkids obviously 
Maybe you guys can give me some tips!
How hard is it to get the website up and running? I need something that has templates not html… and I also want to incorporate forums and a shopping cart and everything…am I out of my league? suggestions anyone? 
A static website is very easy to create and host (though you can’t be a computer/Internet novice). Key things you need are a web authoring software like Dreamweaver and a shared hosting provider.
Setting up a forum is getting harder, but still do-able with a lot of reading, but maintaining it is not easy, especially if you modify it a lot. Search for open source php forums. As for shopping carts, that gets a bit more complicated, but there are packages you could install on top of the forums to help you.
Again, setting it up with basic functions can be done (not easy, but not super hard either), but making it work well and customizing it adn maintaining it is no easy task.
I agree with most everything KL said. The hard part is sometimes in maintaining your online home.
Creating a website these days is relatively easy - there are several web authoring programs that are available, you just have to choose which one suits your tastes and proficiency. Til now I am still using Dreamweaver, since it allows me to switch between coding and design views. Apart from this, all you’ll need is to purchase a domain name and get a hosting service - again, there are many alternatives to choose from, with prices tailored to what you’ll need.
Creating and installing an online shopping cart and a forum in your site can be done conveniently these days too - depending on your hosting provider (if they supply you with a back-end interface like cPanel), they may have one-click installations of third party applications for forums such as SMF or phpBB, as well as online shopping cart software such as Cube Cart, OS Commerce, and Zen Cart. Installing them and getting them to work is one thing; learning the ins and outs of what your software can do may take time.
hmmm well I understand that it’ll be hard work at first…that’s why I was thinking of looking for a provider that would give me all these in a bundle so I don’t have 2 start from square 1…do you know about something like this?
Yup!
There are some hosting providers that act as a one-stop shop for web development, such as liquidweb.com, a2hosting.com, and other budget suppliers like DreamHost.com.
I would personally suggest getting a service with a provider that supplies you with cPanel and Fantastico - cPanel is your back-end interface wherein you can manage your sites, and Fantastico is a compilation of one-click installations of various “mods”, plugins and additional software which you may need for your site.
I have a family website that I host and I will recommend that if you want to use a software that has templates so you don’t have to write html do not use frontpage. I personally love it because that’s what I learned on, but Microsoft has stopped updating it and has changed to something new and many hosts don’t support the extensions and if they do the extensions often get corrupted and you have upload the whole web again. What a pain just because Microsoft decided they wanted to change to something else and not support software they created.
by the way, my website is very simple and doesn’t have forums or shopping, but I know my host does offer at least the shopping cart. From experience I would suggest you stay away from ipower.com because their techs knew less than I did. I have hostmonster.com for about 6 months now and really like them.
Thanks akgard for the tip on frontpage !! I’d have never known that on my own 
And thanks for the host recommendations… I’ll check the out !
It’s true what Akgard said about frontpage - Microsoft may have simplified the website-creation process, but they totally discontinued the software and stopped supporting it, especially in later internet browser versions.
I would recommend Dreamweaver - it allows you to design the website from scratch and it supports most templates (if you don’t want to bother with creating your own). It also allows you to switch between Design view (which works pretty much like a “what you see is what you get” editor) and Code view (for when you get a bit more advanced and you want to fix something on your website by hardcoding it). DW is also fairly future-proof, and is used by a most bigger companies (including us!) because of its versatility :happy: