I would also recommend not bothering with the frameworks. Get Hunchentoot and Postmodern and you're ready to go. I've even stopped bothering with CL-WHO, I now use CL-INTERPOL for HTML templating (cl-closure-template seems to do fancy stuff, too). If you're lazy like me use BKNR-datastore instead of Postmodern and you won't even have to bother configuring a database. Other stuff you'll probably need: cl-fad (file/directory manipulation), cl-ppcre (regular expressions), ironclad (hash digests), cl-smtp (sending the huge cash-money invoices to your eager users). Eventually you will become too lazy to write JavaScript by hand, in that case grab Parenscript. All of this is available via quicklisp, it really makes things easy.