Hi All,

I'm contemplating starting a site to chronical my experiences dealing with a common personal issue. For this I'm leaning towards using blog software, since at first I really don't expect much traffic at all, and I'm really not going to attempt to promote the site until it has at least some appreciatively informational, insightful, unique and/or otherwise useful content.

Eventually, I do hope to builld the site into a "proper" web community (which I vaguely envision as a forum of blogs with "side content"), and since I do want to provide for the opportunity for visitors to (possibly register and/or login, and) post from the start (or nearly so), I'm contemplating whether or not the better route to take would be to utilize forum software that either incorporates blogging capabilities directly, or that can be used in conjunction with separate blogging software. ( This idea literally occurred to me not more than two minutes before starting this post, so I haven't done any research on what particular software to use, among a host (literally at that!) of other aspects to the site, so I'm not even sure that I need to make the distinction of what software to use initially. )

Obviously I have a lot of work to do to get this started (not only with it's design and implementation, but also with it's conceptualization), so, in the interest of gaining initial information in order to make at least somewhat informed decisions to start with, I decided to post this inquiry. If you have any insights, recommendations and/or suggestions you would like to reply with I'd like to thank you for taking the time to do so, as they would be greatly appreciated!

If you want to start off small and build yourself steping stones for your larger completed project - my personal preference would be to start off by using some sort of blogging site (gets you up and running quickly while you can contunie to work on the larger project) I think google provides a free service called Blogger.com I know a lot of people who would Recommend it (I’m also told, because it is owned by google you will get indexed and ranked quicker although this is getting into SEO a big kettle of fish you will enjoy later!).



Regards.

Thanks for the input jbnet - I hadn't thought about Google per se, but that was the general direction I had been leaning towards. What really caught my eye was your reference to SEO. Looking that term up and reading a short article about it, as well another entry on SEM, has made me reconsider my initial approach. It's still likely going to be essentially a blog to start with, but I will be doing a good bit of research on web site marketing before I start the endeavor. Thanks again!