ill try to make this short and sweet. Im in college and had a webpage idea come to me. i remembered seeing a godaddy.com commercial and checked them out but apparently their website design team does not design pages with a database, strictly just web pages. ive got a lot of ideas burning through my head and have some vision as to how i can picture the website working but i can only vision so much, actually seeing some of my ideas take form would be great. Im looking for some direction with steps that i can take. I have a fairly small budget, infact the less i spend the better. to be very very simple i would like to have a website where after it is all initially set up it would require minimal to no action on my part to update it and make it grow. I want users to update the website with their information that will follow a certain guideline which i would initially set up. Kind of like a forum, but not. I want users to create accounts, to have profiles etc and post their information. I'm not trying to sell anything, just get users to log on and upload information, and from that information be able to search for it through the website's built in search bar. etc

if anyone has any ideas or knows of any low low budget companies or people that would be willing to help me get my idea off the ground that would be muchhhhhh appreciated!

 

Either a blog (Wordpress can do it, and it's easy to set up) or a CMS. Check http://php.opensourcecms.com/ for a lot of running demos of different CMS packages. (They're all free, all easy to set up and most of them have support forums.)

The only other way is to write something yourself, and it doesn't sound as if you're at that level.

 

You can actually just use http://ucoz.com to get user signups, forums, news, downloads section, blog, and a lot more easily, with no action on your part to maintain and on your free subdomain which constantly gains free webspace. Just sign up. When you click the confirmation in your email you'll be taken to a webtop where you can double-click "create a site" and you're on your way.

BUT, if you do want to learn how to do it on your own go to http://www.w3schools.com/PHP/DEfaULT.asP and learn php well. Then download MySQL (also free - http://www.mysql.com/ ) and look up some places on mysql and php. Here's one: http://www.freewebmasterhelp.com/tutorials/phpmysql After that, you should be able to get a site up ( you can use your ip as a site with apache (free) http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html or look for a good free webhost).

But, I would just use http://ucoz.com >.< much easier.

 

Sounds like a Wiki to me. Check out WIKIA:

http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Wikia

As the slogan says, "Find and collaborate with people who love what you love." The framework is provided for you, and is hosted on their domain.

If you insist on having it on your own domain, you could host a wiki framework yourself. Start here:

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ChoosingaWiki

Plenty of info and tips to get you started down that path.