Ask HN: How to build a better how-to site

Hello Hacker News, big fans of you guys and Ycombinator, of course. I would like the help of the community on a project I'm starting... still at the beginning, but will keep you posted with the progress.

I'm building a how-to website in Croatia. There's very little competition in this space and a lot of demand by searchers for these kind of articles, so I figure that starting a professional site is ideal.

I already have essentially "howto.com" in my language, so domain naming is not a problem.

Here are my plans for the website: - hire a hick-ass design firm and spend 5-10k to have something sexier than eHow or Wikihow today - pay freelancers U$3-5 (a lot more here than in the US) to write articles that have more than 1k searches in Google or that users ask us to (what's the fastest way to do this?) - have edit buttons on every page so that user can add content (it will have to be approved by us initially) - do standard SEO stuff and build profiles in major social networks, spending some money to build up Facebook page

I want help on ideas to build the best (and most profitable, obviously) how-to website in my country.

Should I buy out my competition, transfer their articles to my website and increase their pageviews by my better domain, SEO, design and marketing?

Do you think I need angels like YC to mentor and invest, or should I just put my money (like 50k) and run my site myself?

eHow/Wikihow/etc. readers and users, what major flaws do you see on the website? How can I make my site better?

I appreciate the feedback. Thanks a bunch, Cherman