Building an Empire - Suggestions & Feedback please

cliffnotes
If you don't want to read all of the following, skip straight to "The More Simple Questions" and only read/answer that section..




Background:
My name's Keith, and I'm a car enthusiast, with a minor webdesign background. I understand how to set up and use phpBB, and how to get around cPanel and Adobe Photoshop. I've always been a computer kind of person and have minor knowledge in many many different areas. I have run a small website in the past, and have taken 1 or 2 Photoshop classes.

Motive:
I'm a major German Car enthusiast, and bought myself an Audi in 2005. Being the forum-lover that I am, I began searching for good technical Audi Discussion board as soon as I got the car. There are many Audi Boards out there, but all consist of major flaws. So i decided to use my knowledge and ideas and come up with my own site, which is called http://www.TheAudiRoom.com. It's small but growing at what I would consider a pretty healthy rate from previous experiences.

The Plan:
As the forum has grown, I have decided that I want to make something out of my ideas. I don't only love Audi, I love ALL German cars. So why only have an Audi Site, right? So I plan on making a "Main Site", and a series of subsites (with their own domains) for each car model. This would include http://www.TheAudiRoom.com, and other models such as BMW and VW with the same theme.

The More Simple Questions:
In order to do all of this, I first need some funding.
1) What are some of the best/easiest ways to make small amounts of cash on a small website? $20/month would be a fine amount.
I might want to switch from phpBB to vB.
2) Is vBulletin worth upgrading to for this project? Would i need to buy a new license for each separate Message Board?


The More Complicated Questions:
1) what do you think of my domain name, http://www.TheAudiRoom.com? Each other sister site would have a similar name (i.e. http://www.theVWroom.com, http://www.theBMWroom.com, etc.). Are these good?
2) I would like to combine all of these sister sites under one main site. Since each of the sister sites would be a "room", i figured the main site could be a "Building" or "house". i.e. http://www.TheGermanHouse.com or something to that effect. Do you have any similar domain name ideas? Or any completely different ideas for the main site domain name?
3) Remember, the plan is to have a main site called http://www.the(?)House.com, and subsites called http://www.the(?)Room.com. The main site would just be for news and updates, contact information, privacy policy, about us etc. and would have links to the sub sites or sister sites. All of those sites would be message boards. Is this a good setup? Could you suggest anything different?



Thanks for any feedback! I'll ask more questions as I get answers.

Instead of having abunch of domain names, you might consider subdomains.

So
http://www.thegermanhouse.com <- main site
audiroom.thegermanhouse.com <- subdomain
mercedesroom.thegemanhouse.com
vwroom.thegermanhouse.com

And as far as that goes. Look around here. Since you seem to have some knowledge/experience using forums. you could instead have the main domain for contact info as you have suggested and just use the forum either phpbb or vbuliten as the 'rooms'/

Have each car type as its own forum similar to how we have general, webdesign, and programming forums on this site. I say we like i have anything to do with this site. Im just another user. But you get what Im saying.

The reason I would suggest the suggestions that I made is so that your site gets all the traffic. as opposed to multiple sites getting some traffic. Either way you are still getting the hits, but with this method everything is condensed into one site and its easier to say my site gets 1000s of hits rather than I have 5 sites and each one gets 300 hits a month. Maybe it doesnt matter, but I would think that one site would be easier to manage than multiple sites, subdomains could all share similar CSS/php logic etc.

As far as money making google adsense is a nice way to make some money. My father has a site and I wouldnt say he gets an enormous amount of traffic, mainly since his site is mostly for information about his buissness. I think on average he gets about 3000 visits a month. So far the google adsense has managed to cover the cost of his hosting and I only plugged in the adsense in mid december. Its not a huge money generator but since it has cancelled out his hosting costs he gets his site hosting for free essentially. So far it averages out to $23/month give or take a dollar.

Thanks for the excellent reply typhon. The sud-domain Idea is very logical. I Don't know why That didn't come to my mind. I think I'll do both, use their seperate domains and do a redirect to the subdomain. (that way people can ust type http://www.theaudiroom.com in the URL instead of having to remember and type audiroom.comTheGermanHouse.com) thanks for that thought.
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As for combining it all into 1 forum; I would like a certain level of seperation between the different makes. There would be too many sections and too many levels of subforums if I were to do the way you propose. Also, When a BMW Owner wanted to check out the new posts, they would have to looks through all of the new posts for the different VW, Audi, and Mercedes Forums as well. I don't want that. I want the BMW Owners to be able to search only the BMW forums and categories. Without paying someone loads of cash to do some serious php work for me, I would have to have seperate forums.


Though I am still up to any suggestions on how I should go about doing this.

typhon is rigt about that 1.

Take a sloser look at the home page on this site. It is broken up into several sections each with thier own subsections. and each subsection has many many post on various aspects of each subsection.


there are

General Topics
Website Design & Development
Operating Systems & Hardware
Internet Marketing
Extra


each of which have multiple subsections.

So you could have

VW
----------
vw classics
bodies
motors
restore

BMW
-------
BMW classics
bodies
motors
restore

etc etc. They wouldnt have to wade through bunches of uninteresting stuff, just go to thier particualr intrest pages. Thats what I do. I mainly visit 3 main areas but occasionally visit areas that I dont frequent. Just a suggestion.

In phpBB, there are categories, then forums. After this you can go on phpbb.com and download/install the mod for subforums. Thats as far as you can go into detailed sectioning. I would need to go one more level if I were to combine all of these into one forum. Also, there would be atleast 5 categories, each with 7-10 forums and 1-3 subforums. Thats ALOT to navigate through. This is one reason I don't want to combine it all into one forum.

A very important thing about the site is the atmosphere it gives off. For a car enthusiast site focussing on tech, I have found that combining several makes into 1 full forum is not very effective. There will be talk of those cars, but posts will begin focussing on blog news and things of that nature, rather than the actual technical side of things that i am looking for. Also, many people wouldnt be interested in joining. why? here's an example. An Audi owner is looking for a site where he can learn how to change his timing belt. He checks out my site, and sees bmw, mercedes, audi, and vw. He sees http://www.AudiForums.com, which is all audi and nothing else. Which one do you think he'll choose? Audiforums, because it's all audi.

A useful tool is "view new posts since last visit". This would be a mess if all different makes were in one forum, because the members would have to look through all the other makes and models and seperate out the posts for their own.





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In short, I am not looking to have one normal forum combined for all makes. This simply does not work for me.



I need more seperation. That's the key problem. the general discussion and off topic discussion can be combined, the actual user registration can be combined (and anouncements/rules etc. can be combined), but Audi owners need to be able to go into their little "Audi Room" if you will, and the same goes for VW, Mercedes, and BMW Owners. It's all about the atmosphere. It will allow them to focus on the subject at hand.

Ok. here's the setup I have in mind.

Lets assume the main site is called house.com to keep this simple.

you would enter house.com, and it would be a message board. There would be 3 categories:
-Main Hall
---Off Topic
---General Car Talk
---Introductions
---Anouncements
-The Rooms
---The Audi Room
---The BMW Room
---The Mercedes Room
---The VW Room
-Sales Desk
---Universal Car Items (not for specific Model - i.e. stereo equipment)
---Non-car related Items


under the "Main Hall" and "Sales Desk" are forums, as expected. But though everything under "The Rooms" appear to be forums as well, they're actually links to full message boards with all of the functions of a seperate message board (i.e. when you search The Audi Room, you only get results for The Audi Room, and The Audi Room may have a different theme than the other forums.. though in reality the only differences i would have is color).

So lets say you click The Audi Room. you are directed to Audiroom.house.com, which you can also get to using the url http://www.theaudiroom.com (through a redirect). Now you see this:

-Back to House
-Entrance
---Gallery
---Audi DIY Projects
-Audi Technical Talk
---Audi A3
---Audi A4
------B5
------B6
------B7
---Audi A6
---Audi TT
---All/Other Audis
-Help Desk
---Suggestions & Feedback
---etc etc



When you register, you're registering to house.com, which gives you membership to all the boards. When you search house.com, you are only searching "Main Hall" and "Sales Desk", because "The Rooms" is really just a set of links. When you search each of the rooms, you're only searching that room. Each room could have a different set of smileys, a different theme if needed, etc. because t's generally a seperate forum.

In reality, they'd all be very similar, but have different banners and theme colors. The theme and setup would be identical otherwise.


Can you understand what I mean now that I have laid it out like this?

Is this doable? How much php coding would be involved? How much might it cost me to have someone help me set this up? is it best to do with phpBB or vBulletin?

I can almost uderstand needing the different domains for the search functionality but that could possibly be done directly via some sort of phpbb mod. As for the different styles you could either have a huge css file (depending on the number of different styles) or you could have multiple css files and use a little php logic to determine which css file to load. Have you visited http://csszengarden.com/


If not its a showcase of how the same site can be displayed in a plethora of different css configurations. I know that what you are talking about doing would have different content as well as style but if you are using php and know some css then it shouldnt be all that terrible to configure. You might can even get away with varying styles within phpbb. This isnt something I have played with but I just might. Since I am in the middle of styling a phpbb forum at the moment.

And on a side note, since generally speaking the sites will have similar layouts, you could reuse the code from the main site and just make the stlye sheet for each site. All you would need to do is make a few minor tweeks for the different sites. Generally speaking this is what I do when creating a new site. I just reuse the latest version of my index.php and style.css and tweek accordingly. The rest is just content and some custom layout pages. I think the last site I did actually only had 4 php pages used for layout that was different from the index file.

I don't know how to write css. thx for the link

http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp

for all your CSS needs. ok not all but its a great place to start and then ask for some help in this forum.

thanks. does anyone else have any opinions on setup i'm going for? Or know any php programmers that can do it for me at a small price?

with a little more research, I have found that everything I have described here can be more-or-less done through a single license of vBulletin. I would use advanced sublevel settings, and even though it would all be 1 message board, I could make the different sections appear and work as though they were marginally seperate. Thanks for everyones help!