Never programmed and want content rich site?

[zDomain]

I am interested in obtaining a (city).com and developing it out. There seems to be huge potential for real estate, vacation, hotel reservations (etc.) I don't really have any programming skills, but also don't want to use a stock template. If i were to have someone make my website, would i be able to add things to it like news articles and maybe pictures myself?

If this is a pipe dream then what would you advise to do?

Thanks.

[zangief]

Yes you can search for content management systems they are not that difficult.You can search one for your needs or you can make someone built a custom made one for you , too.(Also you can search a similar site in your category and see what they use , you can try to buy from them if it custom made or see what they are using)
CMS (content management systems) are easy to use and simple adding pictures , articles and maybe more features are easy.

[fab]

If you are interested in obtaining a city.com, then your talking about investing big bucks, so you might as well go ahead and do what zangief has suggested and have someone develop a nice web-site with a back end, where you can simply add content. I reccomend using Joomla, my choice as the best cms.

The developer should create an original skin, with somestart up content, as well as some automated content like rss feeds. You can then go from there.

[zDomain]

Thanks for the input. I checked out the Joomla website and really like what I see. Is it hard to develop your own site? Hard enough to hire someone else? I realize the cost of obtaining a city.com, but feel that overtime, a high quality site would bring in more ad revenues.

[dcristo]

I would go with wordpress. It's user friendly and flexible.

[fab]

Originally Posted by zDomain

Thanks for the input. I checked out the Joomla website and really like what I see. Is it hard to develop your own site? Hard enough to hire someone else? I realize the cost of obtaining a city.com, but feel that overtime, a high quality site would bring in more ad revenues.

Yes you can definitely develop on your own and that is what I generally do, but you will need to invest a lot of time, and the quality will probably be far lower. The point is, is that if your already investing large sums of money for the domain, why not go all the way with a top notch site, which will be ready right away. The content of the web-sites are far more important than the domains, look at Google and Yahoo. You should start learning how to use Joomla anyways, since you will be constantly adding content and developing.

I agree that in the long run a high quality site will pay off as you stated, especially since once you have your site up, advertising will be a much smarter investment, since you have good reason for your users to come back.

You should look at $x,xxx app. for small towns,
$xx,xxx big cites,
and $xxx,xxx-$x,xxx,xxx for very big cities,
therefore your web-site development which is the most important, is a small investment relitively.

Wordpress is very good, but very limited, meant specifically for blogs, with some nice add ons. If your looking for building a major site, with lots of power, my suggestion is Joomla.