Creating a website that people can log-in and post to

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So I've decide to build a website for a swim club that I'm in at my university which is classified as a club sport so we can make a website and have the university host it. They told me how to host it on a web server for students so I'm using that while I build it but in the end I want it on their actual university servers like another club has so it can have a better looking URL address for it and probably be allotted more capacity and more upstream bandwidth so it will load faster. I know how to do some basic stuff and am just finishing up a class in that type of thing now so I know I'll be able to make a basic site and even add some fancy extras to make it organized better and look fancier. I'm currently setting it up with frames dividing the page so it looks nicer and might try to add JavaScript for some stuff in the future and maybe some flash and ActiveX content too.

What I would really like to do would be to make it so people can sign up for meets and what events they want to swim in them. For example if there is a 400 yard freestyle relay that four people will each swim 100 yards in then I want them to be able to click on "400 yard free relay" and get a numbered list of 1 - 4 with a "name" section after it they can click on. Then after clicking it I want them to be able to sign in with a user name and password and then fill that slot with their name saying they are going to swim in that event. I have no idea how to do that but if I really put forth the effort over the summer I could probably manage it. I'm sure this means the site will have to have a designated file to store content in like the names of people signing up for events and their user names and passwords for logging in.

My biggest question is whether that can easily be done by updating content on the web server without having to actually log into the actual web server operating system with advanced privileges to configure advanced settings for server scripts and databases and things of that nature because I highly doubt the university would be willing to grant me the privileges to do something that advanced. Perhaps if it would require something like that then I will have to pay for some kind of web service from a web service provider of some sort if there are any that would allow that. Maybe I would even have to build my own server using Linux to host it. I could do that at home but I don't want to have a server computer running all the time at my house using up my electricity (and besides residential broadband internet connections have crap for upstream capacity) for the website but I'd be willing to do that for testing while designing it if needed.

This is an old question, but I'm new around here... I would advise you to use a CMS to build your site. That will make things a lot easier. I use Drupal, which I love, but it has a very high learning curve. If you're more interested in having a working site than tinkering with it, Drupal may not be your best bet. Wordpress is meant for blogging but people actually do make some pretty complex sites out of it. The advantage is that it's supposed to be really easy to use. Joomla is another option that I've heard is easier than Drupal, but they have a culture of paying for modules which can make it a more expensive option.

Michelle

CMS is the way to go the one I like is E107 because you can set it up for multi uses like I use it for my blog.

E107 Needs
Apache with PHP and MySQL

It's old, but for future reference, I think an SQL database combined with PHP and JavaScript would work. I don't know if that would require privileges though.

What programming languages do you already know? Try to find a backend in a language you're familiar with. For example, having programmed in Python for many years, I chose to go with Django for this purpose.

If you decide to create a website that people can log in to, and if you've decided to create it via your own backend programming rather than using a website builder, then you need to be careful about password security. See, for example: Salted Password Hashing - Doing it Right.