This is one of the most important questions you will ask yourself over the lifespan of your websites (they can’t all last forever). You don’t only need an idea - you need to know how to implement that idea. You need to know how to make your idea work. Will your new project be best served through a social networking site, through a blog, or maybe through something a little different? If you want to find and meet other people suffering from, let’s say narcolepsy, you might start a blog, which would work, although if you just wanted to meet and talk (ie. start a community) with people suffering from the same affliction, a social network would be far more appropriate. A blog would be better suited if you wanted to increase awareness, attention, or if you wanted to teach others about it.

Unfortunately I can’t answer this question, in the end it’s ultimately up to you. I can, however, break down the differences in order for you to make an informed decision.

How Many Different Types Of Websites Are There?

Far too many to name. Instead of hitting on every one, I’ll stick to a few of the biggies - focusing on their pro’s and con’s, and what they may or may not be good for.

1. The Blog

This is the big one. This is the most versatile, the most used, and the easiest website to create. You can start a blog without any previous webmaster experience AND without missing a beat. This isn’t to say you would be as successful as an experienced blogger, but you would be far better off. With blog platforms as robust as wordpress available, new blogs are popping up by the thousands everyday.

Information driven, blogs are best used when one person wants to pass information onto others. These can be thought of as a magazine or newspaper, a direct communication, written from a single person and read by a different group. A personal page where a writer can give their opinion or thoughts on a given subject.

Pros:

• Huge amount of available customizations (plugins/themes/widgets)
• Fairly easy to generate a following (compared to our other website categories)

Cons:

• Content driven. And you are responsible for that content
• Medium spam. Askimet and WPSpam help.

If your website idea would be best served through a blog, there is no alternative. Wordpress is by far the most popular. You can easily find tutorials and guides describing how to set up a self-hosted Wordpress blog.

2. Forum

Community driven, forums are most efficient when debate or question/answers are the main focus. A place for discussion adn the exchange of ideas. Forums such as Digital Point and V7Networks should be bookmarked by every webmaster, big and small. You can, in just a few hops, find somebody who knows something or someone that you need to know.

Pros:

• Can draw all of the experts of a field to one place
• Very stick website, caused by frequent updates (new posts/replies)

Cons:

• Completely dependent on the community to function.
• Very difficult to get off the ground

The most common forum platforms available are vBulliten and phpBB. Fairly easy to setup and a strong development community means that your website will receive needed updates and have access to required plug-ins and add-ons through either software.

3. Social Bookmarking

Ever seen Digg? How about Reddit?  If so, then you probably know what I’m talking about. There are two distinct types of social bookmarks. The first is the Del.icio.us type, in which bookmarks are saved online for easy access later on. If saving a bookmark in your “bookmarks” folder is web 1.0, then this can be considered web 2.0. The second is the Digg type, in which one person submits and the rest vote. The information is generated by people that visit the website and submit content. Social Bookmarking isn’t anything new, its just a new delivery method. In some ways it can be thought of as an evolution of the discussion board, such as with Digg.

Social Bookmarking sites are best used when there is a lot of interesting current news about the subject. An example to this would be a technology social bookmarking site (ie. Digg/Reddit), or perhaps a community founded on web design (ie. DesignFloat).

Pros:

• Self-generating and the content follows current trends and interests.
• Community can help moderate (through voting systems).
  

Cons:

• Very high spam.
• Difficult to monetize the traffic. Web-savvy users are impervious to traditional ads

If a social bookmarking site is right for you, but are unsure of how to start one, I would suggest SWCMS. It is currently in v1.1, with an extremely helpful community which fully supports their software. There are numerous plugins and customizable themes available (although less than Wordpress).

4. Social Networking

Facebook and Myspace should come to mind. Maybe six degrees of separation. Social networking is based on the principal of an individual connecting with like-minded people. This connection is through some form of interdependency, such as shared values or ideas. If you are trying to get a group of specific people together, then a social network may be for you.

Pros:

• Easily find like minded people.
• VERY popular. How much are facebook and myspace worth?

Cons:

• As difficult to get started as a forum. Potential users can be hard to come by.
• So… What now? There’s nothing to do with them

The most popular (free) script available would be myOWNspace or Elgg, however, if you really want to go down this route, a personalized (and expensive) script may be required. Often times the free social networking scripts can be a little buggy and feature-lacking. For a full featured script, expect to pay anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand.

I’ve Got My Idea - And … Now What?

I hope this little guide has helped you to pick out the type of website that best fits your needs and, more importantly, your idea. And now that you have both your main website idea and platform picked out, you should be asking yourself - what is the next step? You will no doubt get a lot of different answers to this question… And none from me. At least not yet. Good luck webbuilding. And always remember:

“All achievements, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea”  ~Napoleon Hill