Creating A Thread and Allow People to Create Usernames and Passwords

I am trying to build a site like a discussion forum.

I need the site to be accessible to anyone, but I want to make it so that anyone who wants to post a message to the site has to create a username and password.

Kinda like this site is set up, except mine would need all the advanced features that these posts have options for.

I need a form that will allow users to submit a post with a subject (and I will need the post to immediately load to the site for viewing with the subject as the link to the post.. like this site.), the form should also have a drop down menu in which I can input the options, and then ofcourse the form will have a message area.

Then I need to know how to make the form functional and the site functional.

I started creating the discussion forum in FrontPage, then I realized this is not the way to go, it looks easy, but then when I get down to the details of everything, it isn't.

So I'm going to use DreamWeaver MX, if it can be done in there. Please tell me that it can!?

If anyone is willing to help me build my site for free, I would be more than willing to accept that too, however I do want to learn everything.

If anyone can recommend a form, that has a self explanitory way to make the changes to conform to my site, for a beginner on the whole forms thing...

If anyone can recommend a site host with good live tech support and has unlimited Traffic Allowance for a huge forum, and can pay monthly and has Domain Registration at a fair price. I want good prices, but I want a host that people have had good experience with and that supports all kinds of things, because I don't want to have to run into a road block as I learn more about programming things. I also would be interested in a host that has an editable discussion thread website template.

If anyone can help me PLEASE DO!

I also need to know if I'm going to need Visual Basic to do this?
And when I get it all together, how do I tell my site to limit so many posts per page? Like how this site is navigatable and has pages for more than a certain amount of posts on the same topic?

That's all I can remember that I need info on for now, any replies welcome!

Thanks!
Darla

You seem to want a lot. All i can say is learn the basics of any of the following;

PHP, ASP, Perl, ASP.Net. Id say learn PHP ASP and ASP.Net are terrible server side languages. Perl is ok, but not much documentation online.

Secondly goto webhostingtalk.com and post your hosting request there. You are sure to get a couple of responses there.

Thanks, but I found a great host and already they've helped me get this far http://www.giftyourgoods.com/forums/ in my development, I've been working only 3 hours on this!

Darla