Hi guys

good to finally find a site like this as I'm totally new to web development and could do with some help!

A group of friends and myself are trying to set up a website that is going to contain a mixture of discussion forums, news, features and articles (so quite dynamic in terms of content), which we decided to get a small company we know to do because we didn't feel we had the knowledge to do a sufficiently professional job of ourselves. I'm the only one works in IT, but that's with VB6 and SQL server so am pretty web illiterate.

Unfortunately what we've had back from them to date - a graphic of how the site would look - doesn't look good at all and has taken them a very long time to do. When the site was up and running it was always our intention that I would take over the maintenance of it, but becaue it's taken so long to get going I'm now contemplating doing some of the development myself and am doing all I can now to learn the subject! At the very least I want to understand and be confident the tools they're using are going to be right for us and easy to support.

With that background just got a couple of quick questions which if need moved let me know and I'll post them in the right place :

1. If we wanted to design the "look and feel" of the site (ie the colour scheme, fonts, placement of navigation bar) that would then get applied to all the pages on the site, what software are options are there to do it ourselves that would be easy for the novice to use? And is what i'm talking about developing called a stylesheet? The thinking here was if we went away and did the design side we could just tell the company we're using to concentrate on the techy stuff. I found some place called [url]www.ipage.com[/url] that looks like it would be easy for beginners to develop templates with, but I couldn't work out why they needed you to transfer your domain to them to use it. If anyone knows anything about it that would be a big help

2. I've been reading up a bit today on php and think I'm beginning to understand it - it looks like it could definitely be of use to us as a lot of the bulletin boards (which our site would definitely need) are written in php. I gather the alternative to using php is asp - is there anywhere you could recommend I read up on the differences between them and the appropriateness of where each one is used?

3. On a dynamic site with lots of articles, what in your experience is the best way to manage the content? Buying a content management system for us would be out because we're on a shoestring budget, but if there's good and easy to use ones out there for free I'd be interested to know. As for actual changes to say the position of stuff on pages or adding a new poll to a page or something, I guess I'm going to have some visual software to do this with in the future. The guys we're using claim they're gong to code the hmtl by hand but this worries me because how would we then make changes ourselves? If there's any good tips for easy maintenance of sites I'd be grateful to know

Anyway better wrap this up for now but looking forward to learning from you all on the boards as our site gets underway, and hopefully I can help with any SQL problems people have too ;-)

cheers mark