Okay, Ive done some basics... How do I start something?

Basically I want to start writing my first real web application. I want to do something similar to the portal starter kit though I want to code it from scratch (as a means to learn). But there is something that has always bothered me about any project like this... how the heck to you start??

- A pencil and paper with a few rough ideas of how I may want things to work or a full requirements document?
- Start with rough static pages and redo them or build a full section at a time?

Man I hate trying to define a project... I guess its something that comes with practice, but I hate the feeling of not knowing what I am doing or making a huge mistake at the beginning that get too big to fix without throwing most of the work in the bin.

Thoughts? Comments?The best place to start is with the user requirements:
Define them and then refine them.
Always look at the project with the user in mind!
thanks for the reply, however after reading my own post I realised that it wasn't asking what I really wanted to know.
Imagine you've got a spec. Heck you've even got a model. You are now able to open your ide of choice and start coding. Where do you start?

So in my case I want a site with an admin section in which I can alter the layout and content. I want this to have a login required. What part of it would you start to code first?
The three-tier architecture has become very popular of late; it splits an application's
Functionality into three logical tiers, these being:
The Presentation tier
The Business tier
The Data tier
The presentation layer is the user interface the buttons graphics the layout of the page.
The business layer receives requests from the presentation layer and returns a result to the
user depending on the business logic it contains.
The data layer or the database layer is responsible for storing the applications data, and sending it to the business layer when requested.
Information must flow in sequential order between the layers. Which tier you start with is debateable, but normal the data layer is a good place to start!
Hope this helps!
it does indeed, I have something to read up on.

thanks
you're starting at quite a high level- I have been working on a portal from scratch as a kind of learning project so I could practice different things I was working on. It is not an easy thing to do in the least. Get ready to write and rewrite your code, especially since you are just starting out. It won't be perfect the first time, so don't expect it to be. As you learn more, you will realize that what you did a week or month ago was complete crap and you will want to go back and rebuild it.

That being said. Start with the database. You should think about your application and what tables you will need, like the users table for example, and then build you database so you have something to build upon.

When you start with the actual coding, start with the basic framework of the portal- user authentication, role-based login, common admin screen, basic admin functions, then build modules into it...

Good Luck