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[Seriphyn]

I want to make a website for EL-G, and I should have enough cash (well, gotta furnish out a new apartment) to fund it.

What do?

I honestly have no idea, heh, but I know I want to be able to update it easily by...logging into something? Like an online web editor? I don't want it to follow some cheap template though, I'd rather it have style, such as silver primary and red secondary colours.

http://www.joomla.org/ The way to go?

http://cain.excidium.net is my inspiration, where they can apparently update it with news and stuff?

If I'm being too vague, bop me on the head, and i'll try to elaborate.

[Casiella]

Depends on what you want t odo. You can certainly go with something like Wordpress.com for a nice little CMS, or self-hosting Wordpress for even more flexibility. For static stuff, see Google Pages or Google Sites or whatever they call it now.

[Ken]

As we discussing earlier Seri, but for the benefit of all, my wife and I have had a good experience with www.squarespace.com.  Very adaptable, easy to update, and a snap to set up registration and member-only portions.  I may this basic page in about a day.

[Casiella]

Squarespace is nice, I just think it's expensive for what you get.

[Tyzzara]

My humble advice:

1) Secure a 'real' hosting option

'real' equals any dedicated server or other similar NON shared hosting plan

2) Download SMF and have fun with the add-ons and mods!

You can customize the color schemes and such quite easily with SMF and they seem to keep it current. Also RSS feeds are my cheating way of having active content while I am anything but active....

[hellgremlin]

My even better advice:

The Eve community is full of graphic designers, web designers and branding specialists. Put out a call in OOPE. That's how I get all my corp websites done. ominous hint

[Casiella]

The Eve community is full of graphic designers, web designers and branding specialists. Put out a call in OOPE. That's how I get all my corp websites done. ominous hint

Hm, didn't think of OOPE. I've been looking for some specialized contracting -- my sites are fine but not the graphics.

[Seriphyn]

OOPE sounds interesting...am I allowed to charge in RL money? It's not EVE in-game content so...?

[Casiella]

Charge? What would you be building?

And of course you can pay in RL money, just like I pay for my hosting and whatnot. (Use of CCP materials in the work may raise other issues, but IANAL.)

[Seriphyn]

Well you know, "Here's a hundred bucks, make website for me please". I might experiment with these CMS stuff though so 

[Kybernetes Moros]

I'd suggest grabbing a 'proper' host -- i.e. a non-shared plan -- and domain name, and either writing up the HTML / CSS / whatever else yourself or commissioning someone else to do so, personally. I know that at least the latter of those two were pretty inexpensive a few years ago (on the order of 10 GBP a year or something crazy), and for relatively small, low-traffic sites the former weren't exactly going to burn your wallet either.

That being said, I don't know what you want from it, exactly; might be that a free service / bloghost / something else would work fine.

[Wanoah]

I have some experience with Joomla! and I'd say that it's way too much CMS for a fairly small website or community. It does have a lot to offer, but if you want to start off simple, say with some news posts or the ability to have different members posting content, it would be far easier to start with Wordpress. It is easy to install and set up, easy to use, there are a billion themes, and it's dead easy to keep updated. It is also easy for someone with decent design skills to make you a customised look.

I can also recommend SMF for forums.

I'd keep forums separate to your main site. It's possible to integrate Joomla! with SMF, but that can provide its own set of headaches. It's really only a worthwhile integration if you have a substantial userbase contributing content as well as using forums. My personal experience with Joomla and integrated forums plus one or two extra bits and pieces was that I had to hack some of the code myself to work around some issues. I then had to remember to reapply my hacks each time there was a software update. I found the code a bit messy tbh, but then I'm not a web developer, so maybe PHP is meant to be like that...

At the end of the day, you have to define quite clearly what you want to achieve and choose the right tools for the job. At a minimum, you will need a host and a domain name. Wordpress will work pretty well for assembling a decent website for a minimum of effort and technical know-how. It is straightforward to add forums to the mix. If you later find yourself hitting the limits with Wordpress, you can consider upgrading to a more advanced CMS or to coding your own site from scratch.

Oh, and I always hated the ! in Joomla! :/