One of the large challenges many new guilds are facing, is creating their own guild website. While this task indeed can be a daunting one, the rewards are well worth the effort. A good website can be the center, around which a guild evolves from a bunch of random people brought together often more or less by chance, to a real community with a common vision and and purpose.

Before you start this potentially monumental project, there are a few things you need to consider. These questions may seem a bit trivial, but it is critical to your success, that you have at least thought about them:

What is your level of ambition?
Do you want a full fledged guild website with integrated guild bank, news handling, roster, dkp, forums and article section from day one? Or would it be ok with just a simple forum to start out with, and then slowly build up whatever functionality you may need?
My best advice is to start simple, but to avoid problems further along the road, you need to take into account where you want to go later on. You need to choose your platform (more about that later) to fit your needs in the near future as well, to avoid having to move the entire website everytime you want to add a new feature. Whatever you decide your level of ambition is, you should make sure to allocate enough time, people and other relevant resources to reach it. Try to be realistic - a simple but functioning website is much more worth than an elaborate but not operational website...

What is your budget?
Depending on your level of ambition and the technical skills available to you, it can be free or cost a minor fortune to run a website. If you don't have any money and have to rely on free hosting and services, it will limit what you will be able to make. You can often buy access to more functionality or space by accepting advertisments on your site, but make sure to consider your options carefully. It may not be worth it, and in my opinion, it often isn't. In the long run you will grow tired of watching endless blinking commercials for goldsellers and cheats on your guild forum, however fancy it migth be. And it's always harder to move or cut down when you have already settled somewhere than to start out the right place.

Who can help you make and run the website?
As you probably can guess, it's no walk in the park making a complete guild website, but it is certainly doable. It does however require a wide range of skills, if you want to do everything by yourself.
First of all, you need some coding skills, to build the technical frame of the site. You can get by a long way with using tools available on internet, but a bit of technical understanding is probably required to even find and use those tools. You don't have to be a webdesigner to build a website, but knowing what html is would probably be an advantage.
You also need someone to do the graphics. Again, you can find a lot of stuff on the net, and screenshots from WoW can work wonders, but it will probably make your webiste if someone is involved who has a bit of website design experience or flair.
Last but not least, you may need people to help you run the website once it's up. Adding users to forums and dkp systems, moderating forums, updating raid planner and dkp standings, putting up news and all that kind of things take a long time. Unless you want website administration to be a full time job, you need to align your level of ambition with the trusted manpower available. It is no good having the coolest website with loads of nifty features, if you don't have the time to make it available and proper functioning for the members.

Ok, so far so good. By now you should have a general and preferably somewhat realistic idea of what kind of website you want now, and what you want it to evolve to in the future. Now you get to work. :)

Hosting
First of all, you need to find a hosting service for your website. If you are hardcore computer scientist running your own server, you probably aren't reading this guide anyway, so I assume you need to find a place to call home.
There are several criteria you should be aware of when you choose hosting:

Price - How much does it cost and can you afford that?
Often the price is related to the rest of the criteria, you mostly get what you pay for, but keep your eyes open and try to be realistic about your budget. We use http://www.b-one.net for our webhosting and it is decent, but if you can't afford that, you may want to take a look at some of the hosting services in this list: http://www.thefreecountry.com/webhosting/index.shtml

Services - Does it offer the services you need?
Regarding services, if you want forums, automatic news handling, dkp applications or stuff like that, you will need some kind of scripting and database available to you. The most common combination is PHP/MySQL, but you could also go with ASP or whatever you feel comfortable with.

Location - Is it located somewhere in the vicinity of the main part of your users?
It can be a little hard to determine where a server is located, but the further away from your users it is, the slower the site will typically run. Don't choose a hosting service in the Upper Mongolia just because it's cheaper. If the hosting company's website is very slow compared to the contents, you probably shouldn't go with it.

Limitations - Are there any limitations to the hosting service you can't live with?
Most hosting services apply some kind of limitations. Limitations can be to the amount of disk space you ahve available, the number of simultaneous users, the number of users on the database, the number of databases, and so on. If you already know you want to host guild movies on your website, don't pick a hosting service which allows you to use 100 Mb worth of disk space.

Features - Does it offer any features to make your life easier?
A lot of hosting services offer a bunch of features to make your life easier. This could include website statistics, access to content management systems, a range of server side scripts and much more. Make sure not to prioritize features you don't need, but if there is something that you find useful and the rest of the criteria are met, you should consider choosing it over someplace that doesn't offer the same.

A short note on names: if you are getting your own domain name for the website, try to pick one that is intuitive. It's sometimes hard to find a good one since a lot of domain names are already taken, but try putting some thought into it. If people can't remember your address, they may not come visiting...

Added to the sticky thread collecting guild site and forum guides:
Guides: Guild Sites and Forums