Starting a Website

I am having a hard time remembering how to really start a website. I am still fighting with LiveCurt.net and everything that it hasn’t become yet. I want to have it as a central location for everything about me, but I don’t know how to do it yet. I like having everything in its place, but I also want to have LiveCurt.net to bring everything together. At present, the website is set up in a fairly simple and standard way, waiting for content, waiting for me to take any interest in it at all. I have had many theories about the website, including having the major areas of my life (art, ceramics, things erotic) in their own space, while letting the smaller things (cooking, gardening, my library) come together on LiveCurt.net itself. There are also concerns with my blog subscriptions, address book contacts and things like that, that I hope to resolve on this domain. I have played with the concepts a little in a private SiteEngine, but nothing is really concrete enough to put up for use yet. There is a lot of useless code sitting in that SiteEngine that I would eventually like to pull forward and make work for something in the future. Some of the conflicts I am having stem from questions in my head like, “does anyone really want an email each time I blog?” and “MovableType already has notification settings, should I split it?”. Then there are concerns over authenticating everyone in a unified way. Sure, GITI users of the world will be happy, they just log in and its there, but what about everyone else? Should I find a way to bind to MovableType’s authentication, or should I write an authentication module for MovableType that is based on the SiteEngine/GITI hybrid authentication mechanism? I really don’t know how to answer those questions and its pissing me off. The last thing I want to do is make something that no one will use, or worse yet, write something that ends up being non-functional because of the badly documented SiteEngine authentication structure (did I mention I build the structure, and also ignored writing the documentation for it?)