Starting a website inquiry

[Pockey]

I've been wanting to do this for awhile now, but I keep putting it off. Now I'm determined to see this through. I'm interested in building a website, the purpose of which is to reach out to my friends and hopefully others by sharing my faith and beliefs as well as trying to make use of other talents I've been given. I have some html experience, but I guess my questions are these:

1. What hosting sites do you recommend?

2. What software do you recommend? (I have Dreamweaver MX for mac, and it is horrible, kept freezing up my computer.)

3. What do you think about the yahoo web hosting builder/package?

4. Any other suggestions/tips?

Thank-you,

Sid

[Bravus]

G'day Sid

I use portland.co.uk for hosting. It's free unless you use a *lot* of bandwidth (I do, so I pay them something, but you're unlikely to run into that for the purpose you describe), and has no ads or anything else. I've had my home page there for almost 7 years and am very happy with the service: very rarely down indeed, maybe a couple of times in the whole 7 years.

I use and recommend HotDog for web editing, but it's about $100 and may be too much for what you need. Dreamweaver is generally good, so I'm sorry to hear it wasn't working well for you. CoffeeCup is a similar approach to HotDog but simpler and cheaper, and may well be worth your while to look into.

I personally would avoid the Yahoo approach because (a) it tends to be slow sometimes, ( the 'build a web site without knowing html' approach is slow, time-consuming, more difficult than it needs to be and limiting and © I think Yahoo includes ads on your site.

I guess the other hint I have is that I learned to write html by copying code from other pages and adapting it. I can write it from scratch now, but that's how I got started, along with lots of great free web-based tutorials.

Have fun with it!

[Pockey]

Bravus droppin knowledge like bombs again. Thanks mate!