Creating a New Site from scratch

Hello All,

I could really use your help and feedback on this.

I am creating a new site for my company from scratch.

What are the lessons learned that you can all tell me that are must do's or pitfalls to avoid.

Can I proceed with the new JSP 2.0 and Servlet standard?

Should I use the MVC process?

How can I reduce the amount of code I have to write?

Which IDE should we pick?

How best can I deal with creating an administrative site to manage the content on the web site.

Are there modules that I should use for content management and security, etc.

All your help is greatly appreciated.

Regards,
CC

To answer a few of your questions, I would recommend using mvc. As your site grows, you will be very grateful you made that decision. Using mvc not only results in a more manageable site, it also addresses another of your requirements: writing less code. You will find you can reuse much of your code on different pages. To this end, I would strongly take a look at using one of the mvc frameworks available. Two of the most popular are struts and espresso. I haven't used expresso, but I can tell you from first hand experience that struts is a powerful tool. There will be a learning curve as you ramp up to the framework, but once you master it, you'll be amazed at how quickly and powerfully you can build your site.

I've learned that choosing an editor is very personal. I've grown attached to eclipse. It is free, yet very feature rich. It is based on IBM code that was released to the open source community, and it works very well with tomcat, struts, uml, etc.