Community Website Tips

Alright, I figured given the fact that ATS, BTS, and PTS are each bigger than some cities I've lived in, this would be a decent place to get some kind of advice for this.

I'm starting up a new community website and forum, and while I have everything planned out as far as how to run it, I have absolutely no clue how to get anyone to it. From all my work as a web developer, I've pretty much given up on the idea of getting anything out of a search engine without paying an arm and a leg, and I have no clue as to where would be a good place to go without spamming someone else's message board. I don't want to do that--which is why I'm not linking to it here, just asking questions. That, and it isn't terribly relevant to ATS...

I'm planning on having it as mainly for software/web developers at the beginning, mainly because that's the primary thing I can contribute right now, but eventually I'd like it to be more of a general community. I don't know if that helps as to where I might be able to get someone to visit from, but that's about all I can think of to throw out.

Also, I'm planning on keeping it completely free, with no banner ads for as long as I can help it. It's being "piggy-backed" on my company site for now, so I'm already paying for the space and bandwidth as it is. However, I know (well, hope) there may come a time when I'll have to move it because it's gotten too big and it'll need to support itself. Generally speaking, what would be a good number of members/daily hits to where I can expect to make something off of advertising? Not necessarily anything big, just maybe $10-$20 a month to cover the cost?

Any other tips you might have would also be much appreciated. Thanks!

I'm not really big on bumping my own threads, but I'm thinking my timing might've been kinda bad last night so I figured I'd give it a one-time push here. Also, I wanted to clarify that I know the advertising stuff is entirely dependant on the type of plans I can get set up with others; I'm just hoping for a generic overview I guess. Thanks again!

I got the okay from admin (thanks again) to link to the site in my signature, so I figured I'd toss it out here (in this thread, instead of starting a new one) for anyone to check out and make any suggestions.

It isn't anything special at all; it's built with phpNuke and phpBB (I am a more than capable web developer, I just don't want to spend 3 months working on a project no one will ever use ) If anyone knows anything about working with either of those and has a suggestion, please feel free. I'm able to work with PHP, but I'm completely new to both of these systems and how they're laid out.

Any suggestions, comments, flames, whatever would be most appreciated. Okay, maybe not flames, but if you have something I can work with when you're flaming then I guess it'll work

And barring any replies, I promise this will be the last "bump" here. Thanks!

Sounds good.

I'll be over there soon. I'm Lead Developer of UltimaBB, a derivative of XMB, and know PHP, XHTML, CSS, Javascript, and a scattering of other languages. Im also slowly developing my own forum software from scratch (cept a few libraries), just as a challenge, dont really care if it goes over well.

Hope it goes well.

[edit on 1-9-2006 by dreamlandmafia]

Thanks Good luck with the forum software too. I was wanting something like XMB (which I believe ATS is based off of), but phpBB was already integrated with phpNuke and I haven't had too much of a chance to really figure much out with it--just started everything up Friday and spent the weekend messing around with it.