Very basic question on designing a front page

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Xee

[H]ard|Gawd
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Nov 18, 2004
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I currently help maintain a Bears fan forum at www.bearsfansonline.com. Our growth rate has pretty much become stagnant so what we wanted to do was create a front page and populate it with member-written articles, feeds, etc. We'd then hold a mock draft contest with a cash prize in conjunction with its roll out to try and bring in some members.

The thing is, I'm a bit out of the loop when it comes to web design. Back when I built websites (very basic ones at that) I did it all in HTML. Now I'm seeing words like PSD, WordPress, Joomla, etc. and am completely lost as what would be the best way to go about doing this. All I want is something clean and user-friendly like:

http://www.indianheadnation.com/

I don't really mind paying for this especially since I don't have the time to learn to code a website by the time of the draft (April 22) unless it's relatively easy (like a day's work) but I'm not sure what would be the best for our needs. Can anyone offer some advice?
 
Most of the modern things you listed are variations of content management systems. Instead of writing each page by hand, they let you style the whole site in a single act, and do page updates by just entering plain text in a simple form, or by clicking buttons. They are good for if a developer plans to create a site and then hand it over to a novice. You would be hard pressed to name a dozen successful sites today that didn't use one.
 
Langford said:
Most of the modern things you listed are variations of content management systems. Instead of writing each page by hand, they let you style the whole site in a single act, and do page updates by just entering plain text in a simple form, or by clicking buttons. They are good for if a developer plans to create a site and then hand it over to a novice. You would be hard pressed to name a dozen successful sites today that didn't use one.
Click to expand...

That would be perfect. I'm pretty much the only one who has a programming background and it would be awesome if I could let the people who write the articles to just post them through an easy interface without having them do any coding. So you're saying any of those would be good and would get me something like the the second site I linked?
 
Essentially. The closer their defaults are to your intended use, the less work is there for you, so shop around. They will all have specific server requirements, such as database and server side scripting and stuff.
 
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