Alright, I'm very much a complete novice when it comes to website development/creation (I know basic html and a bit of CSS that I learned from videos and codeacademy as a non-related major).

I have an idea/concept for a website similar to Hubpages.com and would want to create a website very similar in concept (obviously not in traffic initially) but have absolutely no idea where to begin or what the best route would be.
Say I sketch out a basic concept and can point to what I want as far as potential features from a few existing websites and make an organized word document trying to explain what I want. Where would I go from there?
I've listed a few questions below if you address one of them please just list the number or letter associated with the question before your advice to make it easier to read. I'll give a bit of fg for good guidance/info pertaining to 1/2/3/4.
Thank you in advance for any insightful advice provided.

Some Basic Questions:
1. What is my next step realistically? I have ~ 6k liquid cash (I know this is nothing) as a senior at a good university, and no debt. I realize a large website would need dedicated servers ect.
2. Who would I talk to about my idea that wouldn't just steal it outright since I don't think it could be patented (and even if I could it would cost tens of thousands).
3. To start a similar website on my own URL with similar 'features' as hubpages including the built in adsense; what realistic price range would I be talking provided I'm getting a 'fair' deal; could they use an existing similar template and build off of it?
4. Random advice.

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I also have a few random questions relating to d2jsp and the 'fg system' as it may be something I might implement in my idea (feel free to ignore it if it is illegal to discuss and mods feel free to delete my thread if it is illegal):

A. Did all of the FG in existence initially come from purchases of it?
B. How was a demand for FG initially created?
C. How does Njaguar successfully prevent 'hackers' or the like from cheating the system and somehow 'coding' in more FG. I fear this would be an issue if implemented to a site.
D. Was/is there inflation that devalues FG over time. I imagine inflation would occur but the lotto/topic titles/guild costs/name colors would combat that a bit. Not sure how much.
E. Other concepts/ideas related to fg.

This post was edited by Blankey on Jul 11 2013 03:18am

1) The great thing about websites is that it is very low cost. You pay for a domain and a cheap server. Once you get more traffic you can upgrade the server which is pretty easily.
Domain cost is about $10/year. Server cost for something cheap is about $5/mo. More traffic = more cost.
Start looking in to buying a domain name from www.namecheap.com or something and find a host like https://asmallorange.com/hosting/dedicated/?a_aid=XatikGroup

If you don't want to make the website you'll have to pay for a developer. That's where the big costs will come in.
OR you can learn how to make a website yourself.
You'll want to learn server sided languages like PHP or Python. (You basically want PHP, JS, possibly AJAX, HTML, CSS; you can replace PHP with another server side language)
There are a lot of free online courses like www.udacity.com

I'll update this post later. Need to get back to work

Thanks for the input. I really appreciate it. I have a list of potential site names written down; still brainstorming though (going to go as far as to look up basic language-related psychology when incorporating a name).
In regards to your comment if I started with a small scale server host (the $5/month type) and the website grew in traffic where would I go from there, and how hard is it to upgrade to a more power host/server?

Also if I created this site at a small scale couldn't someone simply copy the concept and market it if they have more money essentially crushing me as competition? What aside from the site being desirable in itself is a good way to attract initial users. I can't imagine many would want to write for a site for hubpages shortly after its inception.

I'm not sure what hubpages is, but I will say that if you think your idea is something innovative/new and you think it's worth a lot of money, be careful who you talk to about it. I've created a startup company myself for an idea for a web application I had (which is not finished yet) so I kind of know where you're coming from. The advice that was given to me was to make sure you take some way of dated notes that detail your idea if in potential fear of it being stolen. Even if it is not technically patented, there is an extent of implied copyright laws on stealing work/ideas.

DirtyRasa was pretty right in the things he said . To elaborate on that: getting the domain and server are going to be the cheapest part of your venture. $10 a year or less for a domain (unless you want something premium). As for server renting, I currently host my own web server to do development on and what I was looking at was going to be ~200/month for managed hosting so by the time you're ready to rent server space you should hope that your product is completely ready for at least initial launch. Talking to a private investor company might be a good way to go depending on what your idea is because they will offer you money to pay for things in return for equity in your company.

What you're going to have be costly is hiring someone to develop t he website if you don't do it yourself because you're looking at paying someone $25+ an hour for someone worthwhile. So depending on how in depth your design is, that might become quite costly if you don't have the means to program it yourself. I would personally suggest sinking the time in to learning the languages required to avoid those costs, and I (and probably anyone else on these forums) would be happy to tell you what actually you'd need to learn to do if you post a slightly more detailed description of what you want to accomplish. If you have any specific questions related to what you're doing on either the business side or the coding side you can feel free to PM me and I'll answer your questions the best I can


Cheers


[edit] saw some of your questions:
It's easy to upgrade your servers if you go with a reputable hosting company especially

Don't know how to answer your last question about how to attract users, don't know a lot about what hubpages is in general. But technically someone could come along your website, put a spin on it (if they think they could profit from it) and recreate it as competition. Pretty common in the website world, as exemplified through the plethora of social networks that exist.

This post was edited by mebeatyou on Jul 11 2013 08:35pm

Good to know; ill be sure to document all of my ideas and steps as I progress. I dont want to give too much away about my idea on jsp but ill keep you in mind if I think of more questions.

Hubpages is an article based website in which the articles are written by anyone. They have a built in adsense program and split the revenue from ads with the authors. It us also similar to facebook in some senses. I know my idea would ideally be similar to their concept and size. Its an interesting site as far as revenue for participants/authors go.

Make sure you sign your notes and date them. That is very important.

As for upgrading, the hosting company I posted does a great job at helping you with that. You could just go straight for the "cloud" servers if you really wanted to, but those start around $100/mo

2) Talk to people you trust, or make them sign a NDA (Non-disclosure agreement)

3) Making the site completely custom will be costly. There is a huge infrastructure that would need to be built. Or the developer could try and take advantage of some existing frameworks like Wordpress or Drupal. Wordpress sounds like it would be perfect for what you needed, but then again, I'm not familiar with hubpages.

4) This will take a lot of time. I wouldn't be surprised if it was 2 years from now and it's still not done. It depends on how dedicated you are and how much money you're willing to spend.

What is the best method to write out my plans for the site (so a developer/designer would have an easier time understanding what I'm trying to do)?

Should I just have a text description with basic sketches of what I think it should look like? Links to websites with similar mechanisms as examples?

If I had fairly well drawn out and explained concept/idea would it make sense to try to meet up or talk to the developers of similar sites to see if they were interested in helping me create the site for a portion of the profits upon cretion (with a NDA signed beforehand).

Anything works, take as many notes as you can, nobody is going to infer things for you and most developers are going to want pretty definite specifications. Usually people will work with you and if you left
out details they will prod you for the answers (at least in my experience).



Like above, the more things you have to describe the layout, functionality, overall goal in general the better. Keep in mind that developer and designer are almost never the same thing, and someone who
claims to be both is most likely good at neither so you're going to want to find someone who is good at graphics and someone who is good at programming.



Definitely draw up a non disclosure agreement, but I don't understand your question on this one. If it's equity vs straight payment, it's really your call. If I thought I had a million dollar idea, I'd much rather
pay off a guy 5 grand to do work for me than give him 10% of my company, which would equate to closer to 100k if my aspirations were accurate. But if you can't afford the upfront costs to do things and
don't mind paying in basically company shares, plenty of people will work for that pending they also have faith in the idea, but you might have to meet them in the middle (i.e. 1 grand up front, 5% equity)
etc. It really depends on who you go to for work more than anything.

Thanks for the input.

I'll look into what to do about a NDA. I'm sure google can help me with writing one up. Where would I go to find developers/designers who may be interested in such a job at a reasonable level. I live an hour from NYC so I'm sure I could find people, I just don't know fair rates and I'm afraid I'll be largely overcharged if I go in blind. As far as equity is concerned it may be the only route I can go depending on how expensive the site will be to develop. I'll be sure to give it a lot of thought beforehand. Tomorrow I'm going to re-evaluate the market size and potential very carefully to ensure there is money here before I get my head wrapped up in anything else. I'm fairly sure it'd be a good residual money maker if developed the way I see it in my head. Only time will tell.

I may also be able to find and talk to a university student (Good CS program) at my school provided a junior/senior would know enough to help me get the ball rolling. I don't know if they'd have enough skill/knowledge at that point though.

You might get lucky and be able to find some student(s) at your school willing to work on this with you for pure equity and as a nice resume builder. Being part of a successful startup makes for a pretty solid resume builder, so you might find some students who are interested in doing it in their free time. As far as prices go, there's a pretty wide range of prices from $20/h to $100/h depending on who you go to and how good they are at what they do, so it might be worth pursuing the possibility of some student(s) doing the work. For graphics, I just paid $250 just for a logo for my project, a one time fee for the logo, and I intend to make the graphics on my website in general fairly simplistic so I can design most of them myself.