Web Chat Site Development

[bzingy]

I am trying to publish a website that is a chat, information site. Something like this one. I am designing this for returning combat veterans and their families to discuss the reintegration back home. I founded a non-profit for this purpose. Does anyone know how I could get this accomplished quickly? I need to collect data. I need databases. And, I need to have most of the functionality that this website has.

[_Redrum]

Hi bzingy. This part of our website - the one you're looking at now - is actually an add-on to our main website. Whenever you see something like this, on any site, it's generally referred to as a "forum". This particular forum we have installed on our site is a product called "vBulletin". Unfortunately, vBulletin isn't free, but there are many free substitutes which offer most of the functionality that you see here. A popular one is phpBB.

Here's the vBulletin website:
http://www.vbulletin.com/

Here's the phpBB website:
http://www.phpbb.com/

Also, here's a website that's full of free forums (see link below). When you get to that site, click the "Forums" link on the left side; it's under "CMS Demo Menu". CMS, by the way, means "Content Management System". It's like a pre-built website that you can edit without knowing how to write code. Into it you can insert a forum, but you don't need a CMS to have a forum; the forum can be installed by itself too. There are also plenty of free CMS's on this same site:
http://www.opensourcecms.com/

Downloading all this stuff is step one. You'll have to find someone who is experienced with installing all of it onto a website as well. That person will also have to know a bit about writing website code in order to give you exactly what you need. Make sure to use terms like CMS and Forum, otherwise the person may get the wrong idea.

Once you have those things chosen (a forum, a technical person, and optionally a CMS), you'll need to get a web host. A web host is a company from which you purchase "internet space". Someone started a topic about web hosts here in our forum a while ago (again, link below) and people have been suggesting web hosts that aren't too expensive. But keep in mind that most hosts will charge you for the name of your website and also the space needed to store all of your website files and database information. Their prices might also depend on how much information your website can send out on a monthly basis. Not sure if that means much to you, but essentially the more people that visit your site, the more data your website sends out. Here's that topic about web hosts that I mentioned earlier:
http://www.designcontest.com/forum/s...ead.php?t=4315

Just a warning: If you want this done quickly, then it's probably going to cost a good chunk of money. In fact, even slowly I don't think you could get this done very cheap, because it's a a fairly involved set of tasks. Our forum is mostly made up of designers, which isn't connected to building websites as much as it is to making them look nice. You might get a response from here, but your best bet would probably be to look around locally and see who might be able to help you set this up for a reasonable price.

Good luck