Building Web Sites - help!

[darthdroid]

I was just curious if anyone here knows a lot about building web sites. My knowledge is limited to ghetto html, so I kind of need a site that supports wsywg or whatever it is This is for a real estate web site.

I need:

Blog feature
Forum Feature
Ability for people to join and have access to more areas w/ user ID and password
spam filter/cussing filter (automatically)
I need to be able to do votes (for contests)
and of course typical features like infinite email addresses
auto responders, etc.

That would be a great start. If anyone can suggest a reasonably priced program/site/host that would help me here, it would be greatly appreciated

[Warll]

What you are looking for is a CMS, based on your requirements you want a very powerful one to boot. My first guess would be to suggest Joomla but that is likely too technical for you. Instead wordpress is likely what would do you best, it will allow everything (Except the last two) with a few modifications.

The last two are unrelated to a CMS, the unlimited email thing has to do with your host and the auto responder thing can likely be had as a service.

You'll need a host, I would suggest Dreamhost if you want to go cheap. Unfortunately you would compromising a whee bit on uptime. Otherwise I personally have been looking at media temple.

PS: I say dreamhost is cheaper because they nearly always have sales on, in fact they also allow customers to "print" coupons for others. For instance you could get one year for $20.

[darthdroid]

What you are looking for is a CMS, based on your requirements you want a very powerful one to boot. My first guess would be to suggest Joomla but that is likely too technical for you. Instead wordpress is likely what would do you best, it will allow everything (Except the last two) with a few modifications.

The last two are unrelated to a CMS, the unlimited email thing has to do with your host and the auto responder thing can likely be had as a service.

You'll need a host, I would suggest Dreamhost if you want to go cheap. Unfortunately you would compromising a whee bit on uptime. Otherwise I personally have been looking at media temple.

PS: I say dreamhost is cheaper because they nearly always have sales on, in fact they also allow customers to "print" coupons for others. For instance you could get one year for $20.

Thanks Warll, but do understand: I don't really care about price... $50 a month or less is fine. I care more about functionality, reliability and ease of use... So if that changes your recommendations, please amend, thx!

[Warll]

Ok well in that case I would say Media Temple for host, I personally have not used it though but I would trust it for two reasons. It is not "unlimited" and second a google search for "media temple sucks" only brings up some person trying to get you to click a ref link.

I would still say go with wordpress if you are planing to do the design and the admining by yourself. Wordpress is fairly versatile and has the largest plugin and support community of any of three big CMSes(Wordpress(easiest), Joomla(Harder) and droupal(Way out of a layman's reach)).

I would also suggest investing in a nice template, while there are nice free templates they have been used too many times on the internet. http://themeforest.net/ is nice for that, cheep too.

[Burlington_Northern_3140]

http://www.webs.com/ Its free and it looks like it has what you are looking for.

[darthdroid]

Thanks for your help BN and Warll, at least I have a few ideas now!