Starting a Website

Its getting to be that time that I am really thinking about starting up a website. I want a professional looking site and the websites you get for free have very limited space and do not look professional in the slightest. I suppose I am starting this thread to ask if there is a guide to setting up a nice, clean looking website. I know nothing about website design or how to go about getting one. I get confused with hosting and domains, and the like.

I would assume the first thing I need to do is secure a domain name. I went to GoDaddy.com and it says the domain name I'm wanting will be $11.99. Then I went to hosting and hosting seems pretty inexpensive, but I'm not sure what I really need. All of the GB and bandwidth information has my mind turned into soup. Would anyone like to explain all this mumbo jumbo to me? :D

I've been wondering about this same topic for a while as well. Maybe if someone who is wise on the subject would take some time and write up a tutorial for us beginners we could have a new sticky! :)

Best thing to do would be for you to have your website powered by Wordpress (it's supported by go daddy) Domain is pretty inexpensive as far as hosting you can host it for less than $5 a month with GoDaddy.

The lowest/cheapest plan will fit your need (That is the one I have as well) I have been their customers for years never have any problem.

Their customer service is top notch as well.

The reason why I recommend wordpress is that you can find templates or have one made for you relatively inexpensively and wordpress would be easy for you to manage (easy to modify and update), there are also tons of add-ons that can be put on your site very easily without any specific knowledge in coding.

Ok lets see what I can add to Deborah's post. This is of course my experience and just my opinions.

Hosting
Godaddy has some nice options from the free hosting the provide when you register a domain up to the advanced hosting for $20+ a month. Personally I run sites in all 3 categories. I will touch on them a little here and put my opinions in.
Free: They offer a decent amount of space for free and its a great way to get started if you plan on trying out any of your own coding skills or have something simple you want to put up. They do offer some of the applications on the free account, but not many.
Basic: This one runs you about 4-5 dollars a month. This one lets you use many of the push button install apps they offer. These are great for a mis range site doing things like WordPress or image galleries.
Advanced: This is the 10+ a month one. This is for someone needing to have multiple high storage emails or a large amount of storage. I dont think you will need this category any time soon but if you want more info let me know and I will go into it further.

Any of these will work, but the free one will not offer push button installs for what you need. The free one will work if you have some coding experience and feel like getting your hands dirty or getting someone to do it for you ;)

Designs
As Deb stated, WordPress is great with templates and user submitted changes. I have had great fun using WordPress and it is very useful for most of what you want.

If you don't go with something like Blogger or WordPress you will have to either make your own site, have someone make one for you, or use on of the many templates out there. A quick google search for web site templates will give you more images than you can possibly deal with.

Hired Help
Here is where things get a little tricky and I will only add this with the assumption that you all realize I do web work and server work on the side so I may be a little biased to things, but here goes.

Having someone familiar with the ropes of a more complicated site is a very useful thing to have around. These people usually do this for a living and are happy to answer questions and help you to whatever level you need. Personally I enjoy doing web work and answering questions about it as. Others may feel differently than I on this but for me its a hobby and I enjoy sharing it :)

To sum up my nice long rambling. Wordpress, Joomla, Blogger, or a basic Godaddy Template are probably going to be the way to go for a basic site to show off your work. Once you get into adding a cart or tracking users you will need to add a Database and other things into and that will start to cost you either time, money or both. Please take everything I said with a grain of salt and feel free to ask any questions you may come up with. I would be more than happy to hop on and chat with you if needed. Hope it helps!

This is a site that I want to be able to have several pages on. Front page, about, collection, available, contact, and terms pages. I also want people to be able to purchase animals straight from my site. Would any of these work for me?

http://www.godaddy.com/hosting/websi...i=9028#compare

I'm okay with using a template (so it is still professional looking but not custom made for my reptile "business").

I would say yes to all but the Purchase strait from the site. Put some thought into how you want to do this. If you will be using paypal they have some options you can use for buy buttons and what not, but if you are trying to use some thing else you may require a little more coding on your side. You could still add that on to a template site from them though.

I would be going through Paypal for online transactions. Would it be worth it to go ahead and get the Premium through Go Daddy? I'd have all the space I could want and its only $8 a month. That is less than what I'd pay to have Netflix.

I really dont think you would need it and you can always upgrade later with no change to your site, just a change on the hosting end. I have the free and basic packages and have never run near the limit on space.

jarradw gives good advice. Having over ten years experience with web development, at least pick a host that offers you flexibility if you want to upgrade later. If it's a free host, keep in mind that there are some very important features you may be losing on if you're willing to pay just a few dollars a month. The biggest thing is backups. My host backs up my data regularly and allows me to restore previous versions of all my data. I'm currently hosting six websites and I had one where an attacker used a javascript exploit to add advertising to that specific domain. (Same thing that happened to BHB)

Within a few hours, I was able to restore a previous version of the website, patch the javascript and notify google that I don't have a compromised domain any longer and everything was back to normal.

WordPress is pretty sweet too. Many many many free templates, plugins and widgets. Maintenance on it is very easy. I have a friend that runs a book club and I host her site and set her up with WordPress and she has never asked me for any help after I showed her how to login. She's not that great with computers either, but they just make it easy.

As far as commerce goes, WordPress has some plugins that will allow you to sell things on your website via PayPal without much effort.

Thank you I completely forgot to mention backups as I usually do that myself via FTP and scripts. I am not very trusting, been burnt too many times :)