Hey, welcome to MFK.
For the future, ask your salt water related queestions in the Salt / brackish forum area.
THis is a huge subject with many opinions. A frustrating as it is, your going to get many answers to the "right" way to do a reef type aquarium. There are many ways to do this, some better than others. Unfortunatly, there are many who have no business giving advise on this subject that will be happy to offer thier opinion as well.
Reef aquariums have a few differant areas that need addressed such as filtration, lighting, maintenance, supplements and additives and what inhabitants are "reef safe". All of these subjects are fairly involved ans will have many opinions (an disagreements).
I don't know what your level of salt water aquarium keeping is but I'm going to assume from your question that you only have fresh water experiance. I think it would be a good idea to start with the basics and do a relitivly simple saltwater "fish" aquarium and slowly graduate to a reff type aquarium. If you don't have the basics down you wil have a very hard time with a reef tank. A great starting point is a good saltwater book such as the "saltwater for dummies" book. It's a very informational book that will help you decide what are the better options for your goals. From there you can get into the more advanced books and likewise a more complex aquarium. I guess another way of wording this is don't try to do an expert type aquarium right off the bat, start with a "beginners" saltwater aquarium first and go from there.
Saltwater is much easier than what many people think, you just need to know the "rules" first, then you'll be sucessful.
Good luck with this, let us know how we can help...Joel
