If you're trying to start up some sort of community/member site you could possibly benefit from using a CMS (content management system). There's several open-source ones that are pretty customizable. Atleast this would give you a solid foundation to start out with. Drupal is one of the more popular ones. From my experience it's very flexible in functionality, but requires a bit of work to get it exactly like you want it. e107 is another CMS, and the one I'm currentl using.
http://www.opensourcecms.com/
Scroll down on the left bar you'll see a list of CMS's with demo sites and user rating.
http://www.opensourcecms.com/
Scroll down on the left bar you'll see a list of CMS's with demo sites and user rating.