thinker, you need to find a host once you have secured the domain, come up with some ideas of functionality, the look and feel, mission, and features of the website, perhaps sketch out a storyboard of the look and design, how you wish to navigate the site, type of links etc, where you want them to go, and possibly a homepage "theme" for the site, once you have these ideas secured wherever you choose to have the site hosted can help you out with the "building" stage, for a small fee they'll prolly build it for you, couple hunnerd for something simple, then you can add to it along the way.
hosting is fee's are typically based on "size"(megabytes)of website, and amount of traffic.
you can acces the website via administrative privlidges(password)that is usually located on the admin access page, that address is typically only known to the admin(owner"s")for security reasons, you can access tools, arrange permissions, security features, look and feel etc....
there are "boxed" websites available too, kinda like this website, a database structure provided by Ikonboard, UBB makes them too, you might want to know some pph, sql, java and whatnot to admin this type of site.
obvious theres more toit than that, like does the host support the scripts you want to run? I would think you could do a pretty good job with just a CGI bin and some java support for a simple website, you will need SQL or some form of database support for a bullitin board though.
first you must get an idea of what you want, what you want it to look like, and what you want to do with the website...
search "website building" "creating a website" "website building tools" "website hosting" "web hosts"
