Anyone know about building your own website?

[Glassofwine]

I am starting training for a new career and thought I ought to have a website. It doesn't need to be complicated, but I do want people to be able to make a payment with it. I also would like to have a form that people would fill in and submit to me. I don't have a penny, so need to do this myself. DH is a designer, so am planning to enlist his help visually, but he hasn't ever done this either.

We googled it yesterday and there seem to be web hosting companies who say you can build your own quiet simply. Has anyone got any experience of this?

Basically - Hellllllp

you could use either 123 reg, who charge a small monthly fee for the web hosting and site, they use templates so its very easy to build, i have built mine and im rubbish with things like this
also me2u web, same thing as 123.
you could also buy mrsitebuilder which i think is about £40 odd quid and build it using that, then upload it to your web host...have you bought your domain yet?

It is dead easy. The hardest thing is understanding things like hosting domain names etc. I simply cut and paste stuff from word into preset templates.

I used oxyUK as it was highly rated to build and buy my domain. I think it cost £5 per year to host and £7.50 for 2 years to buy the .co.uk name.

They were easy to communicate with and there technical support is supposed to be v. good. I wouldn't necessarily recommend them or anyone else that uses RV sitebuilder as the free design package unless you are at least a bit computer literate as I found this a bit 'clunky' and inflexible with regards to the templates they supply (although you can see the templates to see if they fit what you want if you google RVsitebuilder).

There are a couple of hosts where you can play with their sitebuilder before you buy. I am sure I could dig them out if you want them.

Lulumama(s DH) used Mr Sitebuilder. A link to her site is probably around here somewhere - so you can see what she did. If you want to see what I did with OxyUK/RV sitebuilder CAT me or catch me on isketch later.

Have to go. If you want more info give me a shout.

P.S. Morning paper recommended someone (she does a lot of this). I could also dig that recommendation out if you want it.

Oh and with the payment thinkg- I think that is fairly straightforward to do by linking to Paypal. Not sure how much harder it is if you want to have a catelogue shopping baskets etc.

Thank you ladies, it sounds like we just need a bit of time to play with it a bit. Glad to know it's not tooo difficult.