Question.
Posts: 1109
  • Posted On: Oct 21 2009 6:32am
I was wondering how much does it cost to set up the website, message board, and design all together? and cost to maintain yearly? is it easy to maintain or do you need to know the alien language? thanks for your help.
Posts: 5711
  • Posted On: Oct 21 2009 6:43am
I was wondering how much does it cost to set up the website, message board, and design all together? and cost to maintain yearly? is it easy to maintain or do you need to know the alien language? thanks for your help.


Hosting - If you don't want banners and ad's all over the place you can shop around for what you need. The price depends on space, far as I've seen, but I'm pretty sure you can get what you need cheap cheap.

Domain - More costly. I can't remember what we pay for www.therebelfaction.com but I think it's around $100 USD a year. I could be way off.

Design - You can get lucky and have a young kid with mad talent do it all for free. But unless you have a time machine and can go back in time to kidnap a 16 year old Titus, you'll probably have to pay someone web saavy.

Alien Language - It helps to speak the language. If you don't, you end up relying on someone who does and if they're not being paid you can't be sure if they're trustworthy.
Posts: 1109
  • Posted On: Oct 21 2009 6:54am
so would I start? vbulletin? http://www.vbulletin.com/

im guessing I purchase the first one to get started?
Posts: 5387
  • Posted On: Oct 21 2009 7:04am
What are you looking to do, Recon?

I probably know a bit more about the backend and downsides of TRF than Beff (no offense intended Beff), so I might be able to help you.
Posts: 5711
  • Posted On: Oct 21 2009 7:36am
None taken.
Posts: 1109
  • Posted On: Oct 21 2009 8:30am
well im setting up a kennel. Im looking at doing a message board like this: www.clubbully.com of course with better looking graphix and a website like this www.bullybluekennels.com. Its a private venture with a partner of mine so were not looking at getting anything for free. But so far where I live website designers a few and far between.

So I wanted to know how much the total cost of everything would be and what goes into it.
Posts: 5387
  • Posted On: Oct 21 2009 8:39am
I'd reccomend against getting a vb right away purely because if you're setting up a local business, you will probably be on a low traffic/low memberbase combination, so you won't need the features of a vb, just something stable and easily modifiable. The backend of Invision boards is similiar to vb but less intimimidating, so I would go with that. In terms of the website professional site designers do cost money, so your best bet might to learn simple CSS and just pay someone to make you the sliced images or banners and such. CSS isn't too hard to get a grasp on and there is a lot of documentation around.

In terms of hosting costs it depends on what kind of functionality you want, whether you'd need active processing scripts or just a basic page system. You definitely don't need to kind of stuff we pay for so using TRF as a template wouldn't be too helpful, but we pay around $300, for the hosting, annual license, domain, and labour day hookers and blow party.
Posts: 1109
  • Posted On: Oct 21 2009 8:46am
thanks for the help! Im looking into the invision thing as we speak.
Posts: 5387
  • Posted On: Oct 21 2009 8:50am
Basically, what you need:

Hosting: You won't need too much diskspace or a massive bandwidth allocation, so look for something that is ad free because you might as well pay the extra cash on that for now.

Domain: $10 annual fee to get most domains. The price will go up down the road but not too too much.

Forum software: vb is offering a lifetown owned license for vb 4.0 for something like $250. The community suite for Invision is $250 as well, which comes with photo gallery and blog tools as well, which could be useful.

Dedicated email routing: Make sure when you set everything up that you get emails from the domain you register and set them up to route mail to you properly/can be accessed easily.

Design: I just did a simple google search since I've never paid anyone to design a website in my life (I always do it myself or forced Gash/Kas to do it). I found this link, offering a $480 price tag for a website.

http://www.123triad.com/

That might be your biggest expense right there, so what I would recommend is to learn CSS and just skin the shit out your IPB software and webpages rather than shell out big cash to a design team.
Posts: 2164
  • Posted On: Oct 21 2009 9:37am
Failing that, www.yuku.com is a pretty decent host of forum nature - it's the new Ezboard, and can be run quite well for free. It also offers 'gold status', which can be anything from $10 to $50, depending...

But, for that professional touch, go with a professional host and get your own URL, fo' sho'.