What kind of skills do I need to make sure a professional has in order to create my web project?

You are asking for opinions - and many respondents would not know more than you do at this point. No one can guess pricing and you cannot solicit help in the discussion sections.

HOWEVER, you can place an ad in the section below - outlining your specific requirement and let web designers here contact you for questions or with a quote. You need to talk to an experienced site builder about what you want and the best way to build it.

https://www.warriorforum.com/wanted-...king-hire-you/

Or you can browse the 'warrior for hire' section and contact web designers who advertise there. (https://www.warriorforum.com/warriors-hire/ )

You can also join Freelancer (that company owns this forum) and advertise your requirements there so professional freelancers can give you advice and quotes.


kay

Well putting freelancing aside and hiring a professional to create a forum from scratch, (creating a professional website would cost you 3 to 5 thousand, a forum way past that, believe me they are huge) l believe a better option for you is to buy an off the shelf forum.

I researched several and decided on Invision, which is about $45 US a month but you do have access to a large forum of Admins for support, and more importantly access to an area of programmers who you can buy customized scripts from and themes, etc, (a theme is how it looks).

And you can also pick up free ones to personalize your forum, (l did that several times, and embedding HTML, Java or CSS is tricky but doable.

You can also customize your site yourself, more alone the lines of color, what is allowed who can see what and so forth.

You have to watch Javascript as if your forum uses stark white backgrounds and some want use an app on their browser to inverse it to dark mode, it won't work with an all Java site, HTML no problems.

Invision sites can handle YouTube videos, (they automatically show up) cut and paste text and images, (l have had a few members on mine do that) and no problems with Pings either.

Members cannot modify the architecture to their style though, which gets back to buying that off the shelf or hiring someone.

But l think that you need a basic bones to stay intact or the site becomes a bit of a mess.

But anyway all of the forums CSS/HTML is fully accessible so each member probably could change it if you or someone else changed it.

I did buy one theme that dogs breakfast my one once, and the member could do things a standard theme didn't allow so it is possible, (themes tend to sell for $30 - $60 each going by my purchases years ago).

It seems that buying a forum and a customizable theme, then talking to the programmer to customize it further might be a good starting point for you and certainly cheaper than hiring someone from scratch to create one, (as l said forums are very big, took me three months of clicking on everything to learn how big they are) which would be very expensive.

Good luck.