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 FrontPage has recently been replaced by SharePoint Designer, which I have used once or twice.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

So I seem to have been able to do all that I wanted to know how to do. Now for some comments... I like knowing how to change the font, but I agree, I would use it rarely. What I find myself wishing I could do on a fairly regular basis, is putting something in italics, underlining a book title, putting a word in bold. As for the color, something else I would rarely go to the trouble of using, but again, I would like to know how to for that rare occasion when I might. Such as in a Christmas greetings thread or something like that. Most of the time I would not take the time to do that. As a matter of fact, I use the firefox browser and if you notice when I tried to use the color tags, I thought it didn't work. That is because firefox limits html commands when using their browser and I didn't see any red words. I realized that you did and I went and used Internet Explorer and sure enough, I saw the word red in red ink. Strangely, I didn't see the other effects. That was confusing and I have no idea why. BUT, in the browser that I use every day, the commands I wanted to use work fine with the directions you gave me. So I am all set. The thing I wanted most to do and will probably use more frequently than the others, is posting a photo inside the post. I used to use Tinypic, but at some point something changed and I was pasting the command they were providing and it still wasn't working. So these directions worked for me. I compared the command you were suggesting to the command Tinypic provided and they were different. But I think I would still use the Tinypic site to upload the photo and then just change the command where needed. Finally, on Nan's concern about resizing the photos. I assume that the concern is the time it takes to open a thread for someone on dial up when one of the photos is oversized. So the photo I posted above, is oversized? If that is a problem, I will go back and review the directions for resizing. Hope that helps. :-)

Part of the problem that I see is that you are not using thumbnails for the clickable images -- you're just making the images display in a smaller space so that the full images are loading when the page loads. Create small thumbnail images of the flowers that you click on to get a bigger image -- that will substantially reduce the size of your overall page. Consider optimizing your images as well -- you can substantially reduce the size of them by using a program like Macromedia Fireworks, or if that's not available, then you can do it for a small fee through this site: http://www.spinwave.com/crunchers.html Recognize that you trade quality for lower file size, so what's best is that you find a happy medium in which quality is only minimally affected, but for the largest gain in lower file size. I agree with the earlier poster -- you've got way too much on a single page. You're inundating the user with so much info that it's overwhelming. Find a way to better organize the data so it's not all on one page. Also, no offense -- but it's obvious that whoever is doing your graphics needs some help. The text graphics have very jagged and unclean edges, and some of the pictures of the people in the board of directors are very poor quality or weirdly stretched. If having a clean, well-designed appearance is important to you, then you may want to consider hiring a professional web-designer. Your site contains a lot of info, but it's currently very amateurish looking.

I've got clients using the free space that came with one of their DirecTV subscriptions, and they are (relatively) happy with it. On the (nearly) free hosting packages, often access to expanded features is harshly limited (or services a web server normally provides by "default" are turned off), and more fully featured packages at those same sites are substantialy above industry rates. If (when) you move to a better hosting package, look for something in the $99 a year range with a good feature bundle including PHP, MySQL database, and a variety of pre-configured scripts you can integrate into your site. UNIX based hosting will suit your needs just fine. Many plans in this range will support FrontPage, but I'd suggest staying away from Frontpage in the first place. Using Frontpage (or Express) ties future development of that site to Frontpage software on webservers supporting Frontpage because of all the proprietary junk it crams in. When I inherit a site that was previously developed in Frontpage (or with MS Office products), its often easier for me to paste all the site text into a plaintext editor (to strip the formatting) and then back into new documents, rebuilding the site and all its links and formatting from scratch. That's a lot more labor that my client gets charged for, when using a less obnoxious development program (and Netscape Composer is fine) would ahve let me either cut and pasted directly (preserving the internal links) or just modifying existing pages to incorporate the new "look and feel".