Starting my own website

[Outerspace]

Guys, I am looking to start a political website and forum, basically a blog on my part with a forum coupled up with it. Believe me, I am in no way going to compete with the Hide here, read my posts, I am a perfectly average level shooter, nobody would follow me. I have a "following" of people on a couple of political forums and it's time to take the next step. However for "political" reasons I can't ask these questions over there, and oddly I do not know anybody who has ever done this.

My tech abilities are very lopsided. I can do some things with computers, but have never blogged or started a website or done facetube or any social network stuff.

So if anybody feels like it,

1) Where do I get a web address that isn't a scam?

2) What do I look for in order to not get scammed in web hosting or the like?

3) What sorts of things should I avoid/look out for so I don't do something stupid.

4) I've looked at some software and have some ideas, but am open to any good suggestions.

I know I can google around but the stuff is a bit overwhelming and it takes time to get specific questions, so if anybody is willing to help out please let me know.

 

[pjsalpine]

Re: Starting my own website

GoDaddy.com

 

[TOP PREDATOR]

Re: Starting my own website

^^^+1 godaddy

cheap and easy to setup.

 

[Sportin Wood]

Re: Starting my own website

Godaddy.com. Plus they have hot women as their advertisment during the Superbowl!!

 

[poorboyshooter]

Re: Starting my own website

Let me know when u get it started

 

[nuclabuyer]

Re: Starting my own website

It really depends on what you are looking to do. You can run your own complete site if you are a computer person. You can run your own server but the upkeep gets a little tiresome. You can download Kompozer, which is a opensource web editor, and you can run abyss as the web server. That will make a website but then you need to run a forum software to make the sight act like a forum, there are some opensource versions out there. I have never made any of my websites act like a forum, never really need to. You can run around and google free website templates if you dont want to build one from scratch.

 

[tiNdvenTFHwMdqKW]

Re: Starting my own website

If you are primarily going to blog and just want a comment system then you could consider Wordpress:

http://en.wordpress.com/features/

Otherwise, there are some free forum systems but they are usually throttled back and limited if you get a lot of traffic.

You could use a hosted site like GoDaddy and then implement a Content Management System like Drupal or Joomla - both of these have forum plugins available that would allow you to publish articles and maintain a forum within the same environment.

I would recommend starting out with something like WordPress and then migrating to a more advanced system when you think you have the traffic.

 

[hkmp5s]

Re: Starting my own website

I've had good luck with godaddy

 

[r44astro]

Re: Starting my own website

I also have had good support from goddaddy

 

[Yasherka]

Re: Starting my own website

I am late to the game on this thread, but do look at GoDaddy. I have a site hosted there. One really nice feature available on GoDaddy is the ability to set up blogs and forums very easily. On mine I set up a Simple Machines forum in a matter of minutes. It's free and looks very professional (especially with some of the themes available).