If you're just interested in a kind of photoalbum with some text per photo, the easiest way to do this is to get a free account with a site such as flickr.com, photobucket.com, or similar sites (there's lots of them about). they're really intuitive to use and the space you get is more than ample for most personal uses.

If you're more into writing articles with maybe some photo's here and there, you might consider getting a free account with a site such as blogger.com (part of google - you can just log onto it with your google account). On sites like blogger you can easily choose between different layouts and you can start writing straight away without needing to know html. Importing pictures is easy. For more advanced personalisation there are sites like myspace which are very customisable, and one step on from that is hosted webspace, which is 100% customisable but mostly not free, and much more technical knowledge required.

I agree that it's too much work using notepad to edit HTML. That's why I use vi.

There are a number of sites that will host sites for free. This came up in a thread on the lawn forum a while back. Some people were using freewebs for hosting.

If you want hosting along with a domain (tclynx.com is available at the moment) there are quite a few options. One that is pretty inexpensive is 1 and 1.

There are plenty of other options, but those are two I know of.

I love fiddling with html and css, so I'm not going to help you much with alternatives there.

If you are looking for a place for your webpage, you can use your GardenWeb member page. Check out okcdan's member page.

Hay, thanks everyone.

(odd when I first posted this it didn't seem to be showing up for me and I thought they had tossed it for being off topic.)

I do have some photos on a couple of the photo sites, I can't decide which one I like best. I want to make sure I can write comments for the photos and use the site for linking or posting pictures on forums. I've never quite figured out how to post photos directly into a forum thread here, I always just have to link to it.

Seeing as I have gotten my start with web pages by writing in html, I don't seem very comfortable using most of the web software programs I've tried. I seem to just fight with them, give up, and upload what I've already written.
Up until last night I had been using my aol account to host some web pages. It was tedious and limmiting so I didn't update stuff much and hadn't done much with garden pictures.

I tried a couple free trials but one would have been $10 a month after the trial and only allowed 10 pages. Their programs and other stuff was pretty inflexible so cancel that.

I now have TCLynx.com. I'm definitely still working on the pages but it is a start. There is also going to be Composting.tclynx.com Vermicomposting.tclynx.com and Gardening.tclynx.com Along with pages for other interestes and topics. There is a fee but it seems reasonable to me (under $5 a month) and there is technical support as well as a forum.

Anyway, thanks again and be patient as I am still working on the pages.

Here is a link that might be useful: TCLynx

HTML is the standard for webpages and a great place to start. The problem with html (static) pages is that they require constant uploading and addition of links and as such, quickly loses it's interest.

To have websites with dynamic content you should learn a programing language and SQL database. I learned Perl and SQL via the web and numerous hours praticing to develop my websites. I'm a chemical engineer and have no formal computer programming training. The web and time is all you need to learn.

Other programming languages commonly used include PHP, ASP, Cold Fusion, .Net, Java, etc. I prefer Perl and PHP.

My finance site

I recently registered mycompostbin.com and plan on developing the site over the winter. I have a dedicated webserver but there are many hosting sites for $10/month or less that will meet your needs.

Good luck

A few years back, I opened an account with BlueHost.com and registered www.thekitchengardener.com I deluded myself into thinking that I could earn some ad revenue by posting gardening related content and showing ads through Google AdSense. I posted a series of long articles and had plans to host a discussion forum and even make my own movies. I maintained the site for almost a year, but never got enough hits to earn more than a few measly bucks from Google. It finally dawned on me one day that the basic problem is that the Web is up to its eyeballs in content. Youtube was just taking off at the time, piling massive amounts of video on top of all the other content already available. In order to stand out, you've got to do something really unique, or work like heck to develop your own mountain of content.

All's well that ends well though. I registered another domain with BlueHost to start selling custom kitchen knife blocks (woodworking is my OTHER favorite hobby besides gardening!), which so far has been far more lucrative than selling ads on a gardening site. A few months ago I accidentally uploaded my knife block pages to thekitchengardener.com - woops! I haven't even bothered to fix it. :-)

Anyway, I'm not trying to discourage you, just sharing my personal experience. If you're looking for a hosting company, I would have no problem recommending BlueHost. They are reasonably priced ($90/year if I remember correctly), offer a lot of extra tools to run scripts, monitor usage, etc. etc. Their tech support department has been helpful on the few times I've needed to contact them. The other nice thing about going with a hosting company is that you get your own email addresses - lots of them! I think I can create like 1,000 email accounts or something crazy like that. I only use 2. :-)

For software, I use FrontPage. It took some time to get used to, but I quite like it now. I try to keep my websites simple anyway, so I only use a fraction of what FrontPage can do, but I don't like tedious tasks so using an editor is much more convenient for me than coding HTML by hand. FrontPage has recently been replaced by SharePoint Designer, which I have used once or twice. From what I can see it looks pretty similar to FrontPage.

Also note that if you want all the flexibility of a hosted solution but don't want to pay a hosting company, you can host it yourself. Recipe:

1) Download a VMWare virtual appliance containing Apache web server. Also download VMWare Server to run it on. Both are free.

2) Configure your cable modem/DSL router to pass port 80 traffic to your virtual webserver.

3) Register a subdomain with a dynamic DNS provider. Most of them will work with dynamic IP addresses (DHCP), and are usually free. You can alternatively see if you can get a fixed IP address from your ISP (they will probably charge extra for this) and then point your domain to that address.

This is all free, but there will be a pretty steep learning curve if you're not technical.

-Diggity

diggity: Thanks for sharing your experience. Very interesting.

Just for grins I updated my member page to see what I could do with inline CSS code. You might want to check it out.

Maybe we should have a contest to "Pimp your Member Page."