I'm very new to this game and would be very grateful of some quick pointers.

I am trying to build an interactive media rich website. I have an IBM Thinkpad R32 laptop from 2003. it has a pentium 4 256 mb processor and about 20GB of hard drive. This should be plenty to get started. no?

i guess i'll need dreamweaver and other scripting programs.

Any help much appreciated

Tim

"interactive media rich website"

It all depends on what you mean by that. How many visitors do you expect? Are you going to stream video? Etc., etc., ...

Since this is a laptop, I would guess this is not going to be sitting in a Co-Lo facility with a fat pipe. So, bandwidth could be a definite concern. You would get better performance by running the webserver with a Linux install rather than Windows. Also, the memory (256MB) could be a problem depending upon the resources that will be required.

Michael J

Hello!

First of all you have to understand that “interactive media rich website” need rich technology knowledge. There are varieties of technology you can use. First one is Flash. It is easy way to develop something blinking, flashing, transforming in your monitor. But to develop something real good you need good book and 3-6 months of practice. If you don’t want to study it MS PowerPoint will be better decision for you. You can then transform that presentation to Flash by using third-party tools. You can also use stream video in your site. For this you need special hosting to do it. But if you need to do good video you have to study more that in flash 
I want to say you one thing. It is impossible to write “interactive media rich website” in two days. It is not like to make your own home page in MSWord. If it is commercial project then hire professionals. If it is personal home page then say us more details what you want? If you want something like cartoon it can be one easy way. If it is steaming video it can be another easy way.
If you want something “funny and interactive myself” don’t ask anybody 

What you want?

Hello again.

Thank you so much for your valuable feedback.
I am looking into these things you mentioned.

To clarify, at this early stage I would like to start by incorporating some DV CAM video footage(about 5 minutes) and some kind of guestbook and a simple database to record visitor details.

It seems I will have to get to grips with Macromedia pretty quick. those O'Reily books seem like a good bet, no?