Well, I have to laugh a bit. Here we have professional videographers who are creative and gifted people who, daily, work with complicated hardware and software and scoff at the amateurs who think they can produce professional results with consumer-level equipment and knowledge. With all due respect, website design and maintenance requires just as much talent, knowledge, skills and tools. If you're concerned with quality and a professional look, I'd seriously suggest you consider hiring a professional. I have my own video website and I do understand ftp and DNS, which codec to use for streaming and HTML. I did my website myself and it looks just like my videos: the work of an advanced amateur, but nothing that would ever be confused with the work of a pro.

If you're really this unfamiliar with website design and maintenance, stick to what you're good at -- video -- an let a pro set up a site that shows you off as the talented professional that you are.

Re ftp, it will be to your benefit to learn to use ftp from the command line. Once you know it you can do file transfers from any system without finding and learning a new GUI ftp program (yep, even on an Apple). I can usually finish a file transfer before someone else finds and opens their GUI tool. There are only a few commands to learn. The ones I tend to use the most are: bin, asc, prompt, mput, mget, cd, dir. The * wildcard character lets you save a lot of typing.

Just to add to what Paul suggests above, find someone local to where you live to help you set up your web site. Being able to have questions answered step by step in person on a face to face basis is going to carry you a lot farther than any help coming from an internet message board.

However in the spirit of helping from an internet message board, you might want to look into www.godaddy.com, where you can get a lot done in one stop, from getting a domain name registered, hosting, and more.

Jenna, you really need to get hooked up with a web developer. They will be invaluable to you and will make sure you have a professional, effective site. Our office does about 50% web design, 30% video and 20% software development, so we do have quite a bit of experience with video on the web.

My personal preference is flash video. It has several advantages:

1. Good ratio of fast load time/quality.
2. Makes unwanted downloading and sharing of video more difficult.
3. Easier to make a seemless integration into your site design.

It also has one drawback - it requires flash to be installed on the viewer's browser, but flash is on about 90% of computers.

Here's an example of some simple flash videos from one of our clients: http://www.harvestwillmar.com/Blogs.aspx

I also highly recommend 1and1. They offer the most bandwith for the least cost. I have used them for several years and never been dissapointed. We do have web servers in our own data center, but I still use 1and1 to host video because it transfers the bandwith hogging video to their servers.

I'd recommend you don't bother registering your domain or purchasing a web host until you talk to a web developer.

Jenna,
I think valid points have been made in recent posts about letting a pro design your site for you. And, there's certainly nothing wrong with going in that direction if it suits you.

I don't think you neccessarily need to have a professional design your website for it to be effective. What is it you want your site to do? Display information and samples. You don't have to have a fancy site in order to convey your message. It just needs to be fairly decent looking, easy to navigate, and easy to understand.

I've checked out a good many websites designed by "professionals." While some are pretty flashy and impressive, some are kind of cluttered, hard to navigate, videos take a long time to load, or I'm prompted to download and install a certain player in order to view the video or some other nuisance that requires me to adapt my computer to suit the website designer's whim. I'm on a 7Mbps cable high speed connection. If a site takes too long to load because of all the fancy crap put on there that's making me wait, I'm gone.

In some cases, having a pro do your site might be a great idea. But that doesn't mean it will be any more successful in generating business than one you do yourself. Besides, you can mimic the look of almost any website you want simply by doing a screen capture, editing the image to remove their info and insert yours. Then paste the photo as your website's background.

An important factor to consider also is how will your site look on different browsers. My site looks one way when opened with Internet Explorer, slightly different with Firefox. In IE, my audio players appear as Windows Media Players. In Firefox, they appear as Quicktime Players. In the picture below is another example. Based on the link posted in post #44 by Chris Davis, you can see how the page looks if opened in different browsers. And in the Firefox browser, the page told me "This site makes use of Macromedia Flash software. You do not have Macromedia Flash installed" meaning if I wanted to see the video using my FF browser, I must download Flash. There's my point from earlier about a site requiring me to customize my computer to suit the designer instead of the site being customized to suit the viewer. In the Internet Explorer 6 browser, the first video hung several times. I would suspect that video has a problem with buffering and the fault lies with the hosting service provider, not the site designer. That hanging reflects the problems I had with Lunarpages hosting.

There is no right choice for design and hosting, only the right choice for you. For me the right choice is Yahoo and Sitebuilder. You can download the program for free and play around with it to see if the design is something you want to tackle and you can read the help files to learn how to insert video and publish your site.

I'd be willing to put together a short video demonstrating how to create a page, insert video and other content and publish on Yahoo. I can do this over the weekend and send you a link to a page in my site where you can view it. If you're interested, send your email address to me at dvinfo@jeffemery.com.

Jeff

Well I've got it all straightened out. I actually have a cousin who is a web designer, who's going to do it for a great deal. I'm going to start a new post, because I have some new questions, and I feel it'll be easier that way. Thanks for all of your help!