you may want to try and find a copy of invision board 1.3, in my experience a very good board to start out with, excellent admin back end, easy to use features, fairly easy to mod. installation takes at the most 10 mins to install.
a couple of sites I have bulit using invision as either a back end or just a forum
http://mercarena.com
http://universalwebsiteservices.com/robotics
(my teams new site im finishing up)