Personal Website provider?

Lots of options out there. Apple now provides .Mac for $99US per year, 1 Gig of space, spam free email and best of all the iLife products. www.apple.com/dotmac/ Forget coding and writing html, iWeb lets you throw up a blog, a photo page etc etc in minuets and it's PC friendly. You can build your page on a PeeCee and load it .Mac Taking it one step further buy you own domain at www.networksolutions.com and forward it to .Mac. Two examples of mine are www.sawyerj.com and www.skidude.net both built as described above. I just updated one of them sitting here in th b lot at Crystal on a six year old PowerBook. Ski and surf safe

I recently pulled the plug on my .Mac account (too spendy) and switched to a web hosting plan at 1and1.com. Based on my research, they offered the most bang for the buck in terms of the basics (e.g., web space, bandwidth allowance). I have read negative reviews on this provider but so far my experience has been smooth. I suspect I may run into frustration if I ever need phone support.

The best website designers I work with hand-code their sites in Textpad or Notepad.  It's actually quite easy to do, and you have total control over all the code. 

Yeah you are correct alot of people use notepad. However, I dont think someone who is having trouble with frontpage would be able to write code for a complete website using just notepad. If you can build a website using textpad or notepad, frontpage would not be a problem for you. I think learning frontpage is your best bet, unless you use a site builder that is provided by your hosting company.

When I first started doing my webstuff in '97 I used Notepad because I wanted to learn some basics with HTML. I try to stay as simple as possible and I use an old Netscape Composer program that came out with version 4.15 because its simple, and does what I need. Firefox also has a composer that is very similar to the Netscape version that I use. I experimented a bit with using frames for a couple years, and used a program called Dreamweaver during that time, but I reverted back last year to single pages. Simple is best IMO.

I've been using a host for my domain called 'freeservers' and they have been very reliable over the 6 years I've used them. I've never had any problems that I can remember with my email, or any unexpected downtime of my site. I think I pay $7.95/month for my service with Freeservers. Prior to getting my own domain I used the free-host route. These days all the free hosting sites are so intrusive with their ad's it consumes the entire page. Geocities is what I would suggest to anyone looking for a free site since they place their ads along the side, and not embedded into the page, or popping up all over. Another good place for setting up a site is wikispaces. Once you learn to navigate through the wiki's they are really pretty cool, and simple. Wikispaces is free and the advertising is not annoying. I've been setting up a site for our group of Ural motorcycle riders at www.ural.wikispaces.com if you want to see what the free wiki's look like. Its only $50/yr there to remove the ads. The wiki site was started a few days ago so its in its beginning stage.

FWIW..........

Jack

Team Wally -- I love that picture. I saved it to my hard drive and am now spamming every wannabe ski bum I know!!!

Geek alert!  

Like several others, I use a text editor to hand-edit my HTML pages. This requires an HTML reference book at the beginning and a willingness to steal code from other sites. After I design a page I'm satisfied with, I clone it endlessly.

The most valuable tool in my web arsenal is a source code browser. I use an old version of Source Insight . Because I have so much information on my website, I manage it like a software project. With the source code browser, I can search my entire HTML source tree in seconds, do global search/replace, and so on. I don't know if Frontpage or similiar "visual" tools allow you to do that. I set up different projects within Source Insight for alpenglow.org, carlskoog.com, nwmj.org, and others.

Someday I'll put a search facility on my website, but for now, I do my own internal searches using Source Insight. If anybody knows of a better way to do that, I'm all ears.

I recently discovered FileZilla , a very powerful, free FTP client. Highly recommended!