Help, Opinions wanted - New webmaster forum

I would like some of your feedback and opinions on a new site that I may start.

I am thinking of creating a new webmaster/web developer guide/resource & forum.

I know that Bravenet & Sitepoint have a big hold on the market already, so, my question is; Do you think that there is room to create a new site like this?

If you think it would or wouldn't fly, can you give me some reasons for your opinion.

Thanks All.

What you need to ask yourself is what will your site offer that the others don't? If you can't think of anything substantial, then I would say you shouldn't go forward with such a project.

Thanks for your comment, it's a good point.

I would like to offer a site that is more objective, and non-bias towards paid advertisment. I find that most resource sites sell out to the almighty $$. They promote either there own solutions, or 'review' companies who pay to be on their site.

What are your thoughts on this?

WTF? Three identical posts?

Apprently you're the lucky one who never feels the effects of DevSheds overloaded servers.

Moving on ...

I think most places sell out to the dollar b/c they have to in order to stay alive. A truly successful and active forum requires not only a lot of bandwidth and total data transfer capabilities, but also outstanding server hardware that is constantly monitored and tweaked. All of this costs money.

Additionally, it's my opinion that making a site banner free or unbias is not enogh difference for people to come to your site instead of another. Most people have learned to ignore banners altogether. And the others have learned that the forum provides the best information on a product or service b/c you get a lot of people's opinions instead of the single opinion of a paid writer from the web site.

Thanks jharnois,

Yes that's quite true, I guess I would have to spend some money on web hosting to handle traffic. (So they wouldn't get bogged down, and some idiot click submit 3 times on a post

Now to also change my consept a bit more, I was thinking of making the site, an "Open source" guide. Open source referring to the fact that all webmasters could suggest content, submit content and even decide what gets booted from the site.

It would also include a ranking system for all information.

This would help make it truely un-biased.

What do you think?

That sounds like an interesting concept. The members could produce articles and tutorials and you could have a ranking not only on the articles themselves and the information they provide, but on the author as he or she begins to write more and more articles. Bad articles will hopefully get voted down, or as you mentioned, completely out.

But then you run into what people consider to be a bad article. I could write an article on pagination of data retreived from a database. In that article I could completely (and purposely) leave out checking the passed arguments before inserting into a query, but we all know you should do it. Does that make the article bad? In some ways yes and in others no. The article is about pagination, not security, so leaving it out keeps it on topic and keeps the code relevant, but it also makes the code incomplete for real world use.

You could add a comments section to the articles along with the voting system and allow the author to resond to the comments. I think you would need great control over this so that the visitors aren't reading more comments than articles. This would allow a member to comment on the above article saying, "what about SQL injection?" and the author could reply, I talk about that in my other article located >> here <<.

You might also end up with some heated battles that just get way out of hand. FreeBSD vs Linux ... PHP vs Perl ... MySQL vs PostgreSQL. If you had some senior developers moderating the forums they could keep this to a minimum, but even senior developers have their opinions and favorites.

So the question would be how in control do you want to stay, and would keeping control completely defeat the purpose of the "open source" related site? If you don't have some sort of control then the good information will be scattered throughout the bad information and the vs battles.

Yes, that's exactly the type of site I want to create.

I also want to list services and other sites of relevance to webmasters that people can rank, and let people post there own sites. They would be rated and 'voted off the site'

It would be a bit hard to monitor, but I want people to be objective in there opinions and not just a flame session.

Part of your site's success would depend on finding excellent forum moderators who shut down flame wars quickly, but who didn't shut down relevant threads that didn't go along with their point of view.