What I was wanting was my own forum (history), perhaps with the usual media- photos/drawings etc.

Is it;-

1. Hard and intricate to set up?
2. Expensive?
3. Time consuming?
4. High maintenance?

Thanks

1: Depends on your technical knowledge
2: Not necessarily, depends on the host company you use, you could even use free hosting if you're prepared to have your pages bombarded with ads.
3: You can put as much or as little time as you want into it
4: Depends how advanced you want your site to be, obviously the forums will take up time, moderating and administrating it.

Hope that helps.

Thanks Rich

I've moderate amounts of all four really. Thanks

I assume you don't have any web page editing tools like frontpage or dreamweaver ?

may I suggest you try using NVU from http://nvudev.com/index.php it's a free open source web page editor and it's at least as good as frontpage imo, plus you don't have to pay £393 to Adobe for Dreamweaver or £344 to Amazon for Frontpage

direct download for windows is http://nvudev.com/download/nvu-1.0-win32-installer-full.exe