Hope this is the right place to ask this, it looked like the best fit. My wife and I were given the responsibility to overtake our local car clubs website a few months ago. We have (sorta) learned how to upkeep the site using Frontpage 2003. The site is very poorly organized, complicated, and boring. We have been looking for a better way to build the site, and want to add some features that members have been asking for (like a mebers only forum and classifieds). In our research, the DNN setup has struck us as the best probable match.
Our current host does offer DNN 4 support. Neither of us are programmers, and until we somehow got voted into this postion, neither of us ever had any interest in web design. We build Camaros. Be that as it may, we are trying to select the easiest, most maintainable format to migrate to. Our current static website (www.northstarcamaroclub.com) is very large and cumbersome, and is difficult to update. The biggest use for the site is to post the club events schedule, and to display photographs of our members vehicles (using the awful photogallery tool in FP2003). We do have a small regalia store on the site, as well as some basic membership information. The club overall is a bit advanced in years, so it is difficult to get anyone excited about content on a website, and the current site reflects this. As we are recruiting younger members, we have seen a lot of demand at meeting for a forum and classified section that would allow members (that are scattered accross several states) to be able to contact each other, give advice, ask restoration questions, buy/sell parts to each other.
We would also like to add a periodical tech feature to provide fresh content on a weekly timetable. Is DNN a good platform for us to base a new website on? The most complicated thing we manage now is the pages of members rides, and have over 300 pages of member car pictures. Some members have included short write-ups on their cars as well. We would like to continue having the website administrators update and control content in these pages, but would like to be able to cross reference the data by vehicle owner name, vehicle year, and vehicle generation. Is DNN a good candidate for building this type of database? We do know that whatever we choose, we are going to be starting form scratch, the current system is too conveluted and poorly constucted to save.
We bough the DNN for Dummies book last night, and I have read most of it. It seems like an easy platform to use, at least while reading about it. We will contact our web host to find out if there is a way to keep our current site running while setting up a hidden site for us to learn and develop the new site on. It does not look easy to just build the new site on the laptop and then host it later. That would be our preference though. Just looking for general advice, and an honest assesment on wether or not a couple of ametures might be able to strap this on, and is this the best direction to take to meet our needs. Thank you.