Building a Drupal site can be done very quickly and inexpensively under the right circumstances. You need no programming or CSS skills and limited skills using FTP as long as you are willing to make compromises. Yesterday, my wife and I launched Trauma Adoption after about a week of effort in the evenings. There is still more to do on the site, but it was very quick to put together. First, some assumptions.

1. We will use a contributed Drupal theme
2. We will use only contributed Drupal modules
3. The extent of "custom" work will extend to using CCK and Views
4. We will live with what Drupal outputs out of the box

The steps...

A) Obtain a domain and secure hosting. There are quite a few options for domain registration ranging from GoDaddy to Network Solutions. As for hosting, there are lots of options in this realm as well. Personally I use Brownrice Internet but there are lots of other options ranging from dirt cheap to very expensive. In this recipe, all you need is FTP access.

B) Sketch out what you want the site to do and the main areas that people will go to. For example, in TraumaAdoption we knew that we wanted:

1. Blogs - only specially chosen bloggers should be able to create blog posts, but anybody can read them
2. Forums - ANY registered user should be able to post to the forums
3. Books - We wanted everybody to be able to see book reviews on the site, but only special reviewers to be able to post reviews. Ultimately we want an easy way to post Amazon.com content on the site.
4. Offsite Resources -- Anybody can view offsite resources, but only administrators and moderators can add content to the offsite resources.
5. Events - We wanted a simple event calendar to add events to. Only administrators and moderators should be able to add an event. Everybody should be able to see events.
6. Comments - Anybody (including anonymous users) should be able to leave comments. However, we want to using some kind of screen to prevent abuse.
7. Social Bookmarking - We wanted to allow for social book marking

What we have here is user roles/experience at the most basic level. In developing client sites at pingVision this process is much more comprehensive but the idea is the same. Figure out who can do what and where.

C) Gather your resources!

1. Drupal 6.x

From the Modules section on Drupal.org:

2. Adsense
3. Advanced Help
4. CCK
5. Checkbox Validate
6. Devel
7. Event
8. Fivestar
9. Legal
10. Link
11. Mollom (from Mollom.com)
12. nodewords
13. Pathauto
14. Service Links
15. Token
16. Views
17. Voting API
18. xmlsitemap

Get yourself a contributed theme from Drupal.org's Theme Repository. You may want to download several and enable each of them to see what you think.

D) Setup MAMP, LAMP, or WAMP depending on what platform you're local computer is so you can work locally. You can follow the instructions that I set up for a local install on a Mac. Those instructions are for Drupal 5.x, but they will work fine for Drupal 6.x as well.

Once you have your local install ready...it is time to start constructing. The next installment of this series will involve basic configuration of your Drupal installation to get down to building.