Site Project

[BeanEgg]

A few mates and I were at school and came up with an idea. We are planning on creating a media, entertainment site or something along those lines. We all have experience in either Design, projects online and offline, coding and the such.

We have a few ideas that we've made up so far;
Search Engine
Funny images
Videos
Music
Gossip
Funny Content
Forum?

What we are currently looking into at the moment/ in due course:
Reliable Hosting (Standard hosting at the start, then move to VPS/ Dedicated)
Ways to make profit
Website Design
Forum? (Currently considering its use)
Advertising
Subscriptions (If any)
Competitions related to project and its funding/ investment
Multiple entities?

Could anyone give us some tips on where to start?
What do you think would be most popular, and how we can go about doing this.

Recommend any hosts, professional dedicated hosts, such as Hostgator

This has got NOTHING to do with Sulake, or its fans; this is an idea that we would like to be popular.


This is in the early stages, so please don't go off saying things like "This will be a failure", there's a few people with lots of experience, and are actually willing to spend time.

Thanks in advance,
Sam

[iJoe]

You're looking into some strange things there, you've not even started the site and you're thinking about people entering the competition more than once? :P

I'd suggest not trying to do loads at once, but try to specialise on something on your list and do it well, then expand. So for example, go with funny images, get a lot onto the site, then maybe start adding some funny videos as your visitors increase. Doing all them at once will mean you have a bit of content in each section just to fill them. You say you're all willing to put time in etc, but when it comes down to it, adding content to a site can be a bit boring ;)

Also, forums don't do too well, instead why not just let your users comment on everything on the site and maybe a chat box on the side? Forum's are getting pretty expensive if you're looking for a professional one (vb) but then again a free solution (mybb) could have all you're after. One thing you'd have to be sure of though is single login, so your users have the same login for the site (if you needed to login to the site) as they have for the forum.

As for hosting, you'd probably be fine with shared to start of with :)

Good luck with the site

Joe

[BeanEgg]

Okay cheers mate. ;D

By the way it says entities not entries ;P