How hard would it be to start up your own website?

[Engel]

to start up your own website?  I know nothing of the subject and the woman asked me tonight.  She wants to start a fashion website with forums sometime in the future, something where you can sell and trade clothing and design patterns.  Where would we start?

[-G]

Engel,

It's not as hard as you might think.

I would suggest trying out Joomla. While you will need to know some really basic webmaster skills these can be learned at the seat of your pants and with a few hundred hours invested you can have your website up and running.

To start out you really need to get some sort of CMS system (Content Management System) running on your server to add products and moderate information about them. This also enables your users to check-in and check-out via an online billing system. You can build this by hand if you know a variety of programming languages or you can buy a ready to use boxed version like Joomla or Wordpress (if you like a blog sort of solution) then all you have to do is some graphics editing and later you can modify html if you want to change the look of the site or use templates already canned for you.

You will find it a long process adding lots of products to a CMS system and having photos and a writeup for each takes some time to put together.

www.joomla.com
www.wordpress.com

Post more detailed questions since it's was a pretty broad answer.

[Engel]

Engel,

It's not as hard as you might think.

I would suggest trying out Joomla. While you will need to know some really basic webmaster skills these can be learned at the seat of your pants and with a few hundred hours invested you can have your website up and running.

To start out you really need to get some sort of CMS system (Content Management System) running on your server to add products and moderate information about them. This also enables your users to check-in and check-out via an online billing system. You can build this by hand if you know a variety of programming languages or you can buy a ready to use boxed version like Joomla or Wordpress (if you like a blog sort of solution) then all you have to do is some graphics editing and later you can modify html if you want to change the look of the site or use templates already canned for you.

You will find it a long process adding lots of products to a CMS system and having photos and a writeup for each takes some time to put together.

www.joomla.com
www.wordpress.com

Post more detailed questions since it's was a pretty broad answer.

It was a broad question because I didn't know where to start but you helped narrow it down.  I will look into joomla and wordpress.  This is a project for in the future though.  Probably not for another year or two.  At least now I can give a broad explanation to the woman of how it all works.