Haha I'd like to make PRE sound suave and sophisticated Phanton but alas I put this it together and with negligible cost.
Armed with little knowledge and Frontpage for Dummies manual I used a lot of trial and error...I also found there was always someone willing to come to the rescue of a damsel in distress and give advice when needed.
Lewis media are the people who make this particular message board. Anyone can upload one for free, but not many companies would host it for free.
Depending on the traffic expected at your site you could do it all for free.
This site started out free hosted and we had a message board that i paid monthily to have popup ads removed.
That only covered 50,000 hits a month so the site soon outgrew it. We can get that many in a few days now.
If you want to look at a board similar to this that's free and can be hosted for free, but has some advertising (you can pay to have it removed) look at www.proboards.com
Information about this particular message board we use now, which actually has to be uploaded but you have full control over admin functions, can be found at
http://www.simplemachines.org/index.php
The hosting for this site at the moment costs around $120US a year which is cheaper than it used to be. It's hosted in Canada but is far cheaper than I've ever found in Australia.
The amount of people who use this site requires that kind of hosting plan, but as I said when we started out we had the site hosted for free until it became so busy.
I hope I haven't waffled on too much. Am happy to answer questions, although there would be people here who know far more about web design than me.
To me the rest of the site is just window dressing for the message board and the thing that makes the message board great is the wonderful people willing to share their varying opinions and knowledge.
