group of questions 1:
1. There is no 'most powerful' language for anything... If you want high speed and compact, compiled code, you can write serverside programs in C; but if you want a bit more simplicity and a webpage-based language with lots of existing modules to help with oft-used web functionality, ASP or PHP might be a better option. A good midrange is Perl IMHO; it's not the best language (it's not fast to execute when you start to explore its OO capabilities), but it has a relatively easy to understand syntax, and it's very suited to certain forms of web development.
It's not neccessary to pick ONE language for everything. Different languages do different things better, and sites often have lots of different 'things' to manage.
2. Graphic design is an art, it can't be well-taught or quickly learned.. drawing things out by hand is good to save uneccessary work, looking at other peoples sites might help you somewhat. 'Putting stuff together' is generally done with HTML and CSS, which is quite a detailed concept in itself, but I'm going to assume that you know HTML and CSS, having used Dreamweaver before, although if you work only in 'Design' mode, you're sheltered from the majority of 'code'.
3. When you have your flash ready,search for the means to add it.. it's really simple, and quite easy to find info. If you have Flash MX, it can generate HTML pages with the neccessary embed code, although it generates really, really bloated code.
4. Don't do it. Not everyone has flash, it's not a 'web standard', I don't have flash on this browser, so if I see a site depends on Flash for anything but small non-essential effects or otherwise; I ( am forced to ) go elesewhere.
group of questions 2:
1. Depends on the forum software. Each forum will have different install instructions. Generally, they'll involve either uploading install file(s) to your webserver and running an install script (usually easier than it sounds), or just uploading the files to your webserver in a certain folder structure, which is pretty much all that a website is. Some hosting plans come with auto-installs for leading forum software. This makes it as easy as one click.
2.If you want to actually host the site on your own computer, it'll need to be a relatively good computer running a webserver and server-orientated operating system, and you'll need a fast high-load connection with a static IP address. You'll need to leave the computer on 24-7 or no-one will be able to access the site, and you'll need to configure your domain (i.e.
http://yourdomain.com ) to resolve to your static IP address. Frankly, I have no idea how you'd do that, because I've never even considered doing it. There are other issues you'd need to consider, such as security. It's much easier, and still often flexible and configurable, to 'rent' space on a shared or dedicated server, which is already configured, usually has an uptime guarantee, and is managed by professionals.
3. No idea which is best, this forum is vBulletin and it's quite 'skinned', I've used yaBB (Which is messy to skin), and I've written my own, which was easy to skin because I made it that way.. You'd have to look at forums people have, and how well they've skinned them.
4. It's extremely time consuming to do it right. It's easy to make a messageboard, easy to make users / logins / control panels etc.. But, it's hard to make something as powerful and error-free as say, vBulletin, without putting in the same effort the makers of vBulletin put in. On that note, I never finished my forum software... It turned into something else completely (much more complicated than what was originally planned), and it's right at the bottom of my stack of side projects; but for a long while, it consumed most of my free time.
5. These are good questions, but they are very general. The only answers I can give are based on preference, opinion and experience. If that's the kind of answers you want, then yes, they're good questions.
group of questions 3.
1. Dreamweaver is good for developing graphical frontends, but it's practically useless for generating application code/script. The templating system is ok, but a text editor + XSLT would give you 800% more power with, admitadly, possibly 300% more effort. Assuming that web development is scripting and marking-up (i.e. making HTML and serverside code) while web design is only graphical; all you need for web development is a text editor (preferably one that colors in syntax as Dreamweaver does) and perhaps some compilers and transformation tools (XSLT for example - look it up if you want to know more about it).
2. if you want a point-and-click HTML generator, Dreamweaver is certainly the most well-know, I don't know of any others without researching it, if you want to get down and gritty with HTML and CSS (which I'd advise that you do) then there are many syntax-coloring text editors, some of them offer project management like Dreamweaver's. On Windows; EditPlus is a good text editor, but (I think) it doens't offer much in the way of project management beyond a filesystem browser, there are others, Komodo is a good Windows all-rounder. I'm a Linux user these days, and I use a program called Kate; which colors in code in any language (you can even write your own syntax highlighting grammars), and offers basic project management, but no FTP. I actually made the move to Linux to get 'closer' to the existance environment of a website I was developing. That, or i just thought it would cool. at the time. I dunno; nonetheless, I stay here (Linux) most of the time now.
Erm. Hope that helps somewhat.. I've tried not to give answers that are too 'empty'.. But, like I said previously, these are very general questions, and some of them have no single correct answer.
Unsolved 
Offline 
