Need some IT help or direction

[Nightengale]

Hey guys haven't been on in a while, but I'm in need of some help or direction from some of you IT guys. I have set up a Facebook page called "757 garage built motorcycles" and have had a lot of good response. I am looking to set up a forum very similar to this site, but for garage built motorcycles. I want to be able to make a network of guys that build or bring back to life their own bikes. It won't be for any specific type of bike.

I was wondering about how to go about setting it up and about how much it would cost. What I need to do first and so on. Thanks in advance for any advice or direction you guys could give me.

[Tat2demon]

Ive set up a couple forums. Its not nearly as complicated as it seems.

First you will need to secure a site name and a place to host it. If you dont want to host it yourself I recommend hostmonster.com. They can secure your name and host your site. I dont exactly remember the cost but I think it was something like $30 a year for the domain name and $110/year for hosting. The price is decent and they have great customer support.

Once you do that you will need to pick a forum software. I prefer phpbb. Its free and fairly customizable.

The other main option is vbullitin. Im not sure on the cost but I know its not free. It does have more options and I think looks better than phpbb.

Both have excellent forums for help/direction and there are plenty of tutorials online to show you how to set up each one.

After you pick your forum software its just a matter of figuring out the interface of the hosting site to upload your board and create it the way you want. Again, there are some good tutorials out there for it. Some however is just digging through the software and figuring it out.

[bikerphil]

Not an expert here by any means, this one looks pretty easy....

http://www.wix.com/

[Tat2demon]

Pretty sure Wix is just for regular websites, not forums.

[Nightengale]

Vbulliten

Yeah vbulliten is about 300 to 400 bucks

[Tat2demon]

Oh wow. I would definitely stick with phpbb then. Thats all Ive used and have been pretty happy with it.