Hey mi_gwich, Welcome to Lunarforums     

If you nothing of coding, designing or building websites and would rather learn a CMS than to pay someone to do it all for you, then I would definitely suggest using a CMS. I would personally recommend Joomla as having all you need and having the easiest learning curve. You can install it automatically from Cpanel via Fantastico and they have a very good support team and forums plus there are people here in these forums that use it and can also help.


I hope this was helpful,
RandyT

I would go ahead and give it a shot - install it in a test folder first to see if you are going to like working on it.  Personally I wouldn't wait - because Fantatico takes a while to update anyways, so that might be making you wait even longer, and by then you could be waiting for Joomla 2.   Hope that helps!

CMS sites are great to give the user most of the functions of a major site, an administration back end, and permission based user groups. However, the problem normally comes when you want to install a custom program, you have a custom need, or an issue in the cms arises (it will happen). Most people also have a problem when they want their site to look different then the other 200,000 cms users out there.  Most cms templates are not easy for a non designer/programmer to create.  Which means you either learn the design laws of the cms you're using or you pay someone that knows them to create a template for you.

I would suggest you learn how to manually install whatever cms system you decide to use. Learn how to install addon's, learn how to use phpmyadmin, learn your way around the databases.  Self install programs that hosts use are almost always out of date and do not keep up with any security packages for the cms systems.  So it's a value to you and your future members that you have the knowledge how to do it yourself.

Do not forget to backup your site to your local hard drive (cpanel can do this) do not trust the "host" backup.  Sooner or later an issue will arise and there is nothing worse then losing all your data. It will doubly sting if you have an active member base, customer data, or an active forum.  Yes, most hosts offer backup services, but on more then one occasion I've had a host "restore" data and the databases are not correct, permissions settings are not right and the CMS will not function. This is when knowing how your cms works comes into play. If you don't know how the cms actually works you will be in a panic and end up shelling out cash to someone to fix your setup.