Advice on creating 1st web site

[Dwayne]

Hello,

Really new to this and I hope some of you can help me. Well I really dont want to do anything fancy with graphics or embeded video etc. What I want to do is just create a simple web site (knowledge base) that will have links to pages that others can click on where I work. I dont want them to be able to create the initial links though. I will set that up. I want them to be able to click on a link that I have created and be able to create a new document on how to do something using fillable fields. Once they filled in the predefined fields they would hit save and that would be saved as one of the documents in that group they clicked on. Then anyone else could click on that and read descriptions and resolutions to problems that others have created. Does that make sense? Here is an example.

-User in dept goes to created site:
-Looks at all available links and decides he/she has solution to new problem in topic "Vacuums".
-Clicks on link. It opens with other links of solutions that have already been created.
-User sees that they have a solution that is not there.
-User hits "New" or "Create", (however I word it) and a fillable form comes up where they can put in a subject like "How to replace vacuum belt", along with a description section and resolution section or what other fields are intitally set up. (I want all fillable fields to be the same for every topic).
-User then would hit save and that form would then be saved under the topic "Vacuums" and available for all others to see and use.
-Document would be saved with a date, time stamp, etc

Some of this I can figure out. What would be a good program to use for this? I dont beleive it will be too complicated Im just not too sure where to start. Is this something that I could easily create using Frontpage, or would I need Dreamweaver or something like that.
Would I create the fillable from using word and then save as html?
What about the blank form that comes up. What would I create that with?
I know how to create links and tie them to things. Just dont know what to use and what would be best. Is there an easy way to create a fillable form that I can link to or do I need to create something like that by playing around with Visual Basic.

Thanks a lot for any help, guidance.

[kelly23]

It sounds to me like a forum/message board like this or phpBB would work very well. Check with your host to see if one like phpBB is pre-installed with your hosting account.

You'll need a database like mySQL or Access to store the information that's posted.

. . . and whatever you do, DON'T create forms in Word and convert them to html. If you use a program like phpBB, the forms are already created for you, and if you decide to do everything from scratch, you should either create your forms in Notepad (or some other text editor) or use an html editing program. Either way, you'll need a server-side language to write data to the server.