Starting Website

I wanted to know what would be the best way to go about starting a website? I want to create a website for 18-25 year olds and give them reviews on restaurants/places to hang out at in the Philadelphia area. It can become boring doing the same thing every weekend but I think a website like that can freshen up things for us young adults.

I was looking at dreamhost and their pricing is very attractive. I have no problem in paying for the hosting, $8/month is not that expensive at all. But my main concern was my expertise in creating websites. I was looking at a way to create a nice website and ran into "ReviewPost PHP". It doesnt look that hard to get up and running and I think it would be perfect for my site. I can put restaurant reviews on there (a few pics with a nice review of the place).

I am not trying to create a social networking site but a site where young adults in Philly can hit up when trying to find somewhere to eat/check a movie/finding something to do for the weekend. Let me know if I am traveling down the right road, Thanks!

I currently use Dreamhost. There is a Mac-Forums discount here somewhere!

You could use Wordpress and customize it a bit. It would basically be a blog, but you could search for the posts (Bars etc.) and have a page for certain things, have a looka t Wordpress.com. It is free an might be usefull.

What about vbportal? I looked at some websites that use it and has a lot of things you can customize for your site.

My advice would be to learn HTML first.
Sure you can use something like Dreamweaver or some other WYSIWYG editor, but being able to understand what that code says is worth much more in my opinion.
Once you get a basic grip on the coding, then you can come up with the design and layout for your page, then you can find out about hosting and whatnot. You don't want to put the cart before the horse, remember :black:

...i feel ya

Actually if you want a quick and easy way to get something up and something pretty nice looking.. try looking into Rapidweaver.. it's extremely easy for newbies and actually writes pretty decent code.

Mac-Forums Dreamhost discount:

http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=34452

Me and my friend run a web site business:
http://epherion.com/

We could offer hosting for 5 dollars a month for what you need I'd expect. We also could design the site for you, and we're cheaper than probably any other business you could find around you. I live in West Chester, right outside of philly. Post if your interested and I could send you my email adress.

Also we could work out whatever kind of hosting you need. Space and bandwidth shouldn't be a problem for us to provide.

Hey pdditty-

I almost posted a new thread but decided to dig really deep before posting. I was wondering if you had chosen a path and made anything of it. I'm wanting to do this in my area as well.

I like the idea of wordpress. I've been looking for a rating plugin, and I found this:

http://wiki.wordpress.org/Ratings%20Plugin

It might work well, I was looking for something a little more fun, one that you could drag to rate. I like the tripadvisor type ratings if anyone knows how we can do that.

I've used Joomla on a few sites and really like it, but I haven't been able to find exactly what I'm looking for. Any more help would be very appreciated.

Thanks,

Consider Joomla / Mambo for content management.

giulio said:

Consider Joomla / Mambo for content management.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I mentioned that I had used Joomla for other sites and I do like it, I'm just looking for some type of additions that would add a rating capabilities. The ones on the plugin site don't have good reviews.

Anything else?

Xoops is worth looking at - I've used it for a few sites in the past and it's not hard to customise once you get used to it. The community at Xoops is pretty decent as well so there's usually someone about to give you a hand.

If you want more ideas then OpenSourceCMS is a great place to look - scroll about a 3rd of the way down the page and you should see a menu on the left - choose Portals (CMS) and you should see a fairly comprehensive list of options - one neat feature with this site is that they have a very basic demo of each pice of software they're show-casing so you can see if you like the admin panel etc - although I must warn you that what they show is very basic and you can heavily modify any of them to give it a personal touch or to make it better suited to your project.

Oh and if you look at Xoops (I suspect the others are similar) they have sections were people post links to their sites - looking through these might give you an idea of what other people have managed to do - and you may even find someone has produced what your looking at in another part of the country - you can then 'hopefully' get ideas - see what modules they've used to create that site and if the other webmaster is not too busy - you may be able to get advice from them; how did they attract local visitors, what companies, if any, have been happy to discuss local advertising or sponsorship etc. etc.