Website Templates?
 

Does anyone have any suggestions for web design and hosting services? I have no experience in web design, and would like to find a place that can setup a site for me, host it, but allow me to update it.

I found a couple of older threads on this subject, but I'd like to hear the latest opinions. Thanks.

Austin Walton

OK, anyone on here want to pitch themselves to design a website for me?

EDIT:

This probably can go unsaid...I will need to be able to host video content

Austin,

I took a quick glance at the Web Site Hosting Services reviews on PC Magazine. It looks like Homestead QuickSites would be a good choice for your purposes.

Yahoo offers web site hosting and design services.
Mark

Thanks guys. I will check those out. Much appreciated.

I strongly recomand www.bizland.com you don't need any knowladge or expirience and can make a very nice site.

The easiest way to get started with your own web site is to simply get a Blog:

http://blogger.com
Free service run by Google

http://wordpress.com
Free service Blogger alternative

And I assume as a videomaker, you might want to post video on your site, here are some good guides to doing that:

http://freevlog.org
How to set up a video blog and host your video for free, good tips and reference information here

http://feevlog.com
How to set up a video blog and host your media for a fee

http://feedburner.com
FeedBurner makes it easy to publish an RSS feed of your videos so people can subscribe, for example, through iTunes, without you having to do any of the heavy lifting except to create a video blog with one of the free tools above!

Now if you want to do something more elaborate, then you want to have someone craft a web site for you, then sign up for a web hosting service, and you can build anything you want. Or, you can also go the route of some of these template based hosting services that will get you up an running right away. There are lots of options out there, Danny Natovich suggested http://www.bizland.com, for example.

For example you can install the popular free and open source WordPress blogging platform on your own web hosting server, it makes a nice basis for a simple site you can easily update without knowing HTML and all that stuff once a template has been created for you by someone who knows WordPress. Furthermore you can easily register your own domain name and map that to your own web hosting account. With something like WordPress running on a web hosting account, you have the flexibility to grow and add stuff, which the free blogging accounts don't let you do, but there is, of course, a trade-off in terms of complexity.

If you take the route of a hosting account with a web hosting provider, I strongly suggest you choose a web hosting service that provides the service using Linux or FreeBSD hosts. This is about cost, reliability, and flexibility. There's a reason a majority of the web servers in the world run the open source Apache web server on a system running a flavor of the Unix operating system, Linux being the most popular and FreeBSD also a strong contender. As far as hosting services themselves, there are many good, reliable hosting services out there offering shared web hosting and mail services (your site shares the same web server machine as several others so you cna keep costs down), however, I personally have my web and mail hosted by pair networks (http://www.pair.com), they are reliable, and I've used them since 1996 without any serious failures or service disruptions, however, there are other good services out there, just be wary, not all web hosting services are created equal, that's all I'm really saying.