How do I develop a major website idea?

Ideas are a dime a dozen. The winning is in the execution.

You should first write a business plan, which shows your market, your financial projections, and your operating plan for at least the first year.

Then you have to decide how you are going to finance your plan. Are you going to partner with a web designer? If so, what do you bring to the party besides your idea?

Are you going to look for venture capital? Be prepared to end up with a percentage of ownership depending on how you fund things.

If I have not discouraged you, you are ready to take on the rigors of entrepreneurship.

I would like to emphasize the possible need of investors. Pitch your idea to developers and make a reasonable deal with them. Either that, or you will have to learn programming and coding!

Put together an investment proposal. Make sure you explain in full how the investors will make lots and lots of money against their likely risk of another so called great idea failing miserably.

and don’t mention anything to them about your upside down car loan

Hire someone to create a simplified version of what you want to do. Run it and see if you think anything needs to be improved. You could put it out on the Web and restrict access by having a few selected user ids and passwords, which you could give out to a some trusted friends to get their comments. If after all this, you still think you have a great idea then you can start looking for investors. It helps to have something that people can look at to get a better idea of what it is you want to do.

Just do it. Web businesses have the least overhead of any businesses you could start. Hire a good web design student to help you on a “work for hire” basis to ensure that you own everything developed. If you run out of money, you just stop, with nothing lost but time and money. If you can start to earn money before you run out of money, you’ve succeeded. Roll over your income into more development, and grow it until it’s everything you wanted it to be (the next Amazon.com or whatever…) and at that point you can sit back and rake it in, or sell it to Google for a billion dollars.

@Ltryptophan If you have your idea to the stage where you’re ready to start a website, then using templates can be a viable alternative. You’ll also need an html editor to edit the code, which is not as hard as it seems. (These items and tutorials are available online either free or very cheap.)

This may take you some time to get a reasonable result, but if funds are tight, quite a reasonable solution. Later on you can have the code cleaned up, if necessary.

I wish you well.

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies or my substantial student loans!

First you should start with mindmapping your idea. Just google it. Take this and go to someone who has already built a big website. Sign NDA first.