the current Mrs Daryl1968 needs/wants to set up a website.
Can anyone recommend a good, easy 'template' type web hosting site? Free would be great but cheap works too.
 

WIX.COM

I made one on it after checking out drumstixkev's on it.  Easy, free and comes out as nice as ya wanna make it.  Has a good music player too

Heres the one I started but havent been in in a while to work on it

http://digi2ns.wix.com/digi2ns

cheers Mike - nice - I will get her to have a look later - expect some hits on your site tonight :)

Have her check out kevs as well, Lots of good ideas out there. I have a friend that has a photography studio site built as well that came out nice

Thanks Mike......I also was looking into Wix a few weeks back and wanted to set one up.......easy & free makes it.....well, easy & free!!  

I use separate web creation software from my host.  my host is just a host.  but it is cheap and pretty easy.

webeasy professional

www.oneandone.com
oh - and oneandone does have webcreation tools built into the account as well, but I don't use those myself.

I use one.com for all my web hosting needs. It's pretty good and have some excellent web site building tools. And it's ridiculously cheap. Not free, but cheap and you get straight up .com .eu .whatever adresses as well.

I think it works in the US as well.

daryl1968


the current Mrs Daryl1968 needs/wants to set up a website.
Can anyone recommend a good, easy 'template' type web hosting site? Free would be great but cheap works too.
 

Mike has a good link. If you are looking for free and easy to construct without using html you may consider a wordpress site. You can pick your own name with a .wordpress after the extension. They have hundreds of templates to choose from too. This is a blog site but you can imbed video from You tube Vimeo and other video sites. You can add photos and pdf files. Other media can be stored there as well. The account is free.


I have two free sites from Wordpress. here is one of them.


http://bvawe.wordpress.com/the-monetary-history-of-america/ 

You can also imbed music players from Reverbnation and other sites.

For 99.00 a year you can get your own domain name, get an additional 5 gigs of space, remove the adds, have access to their video player and song player, they will host your site, and a few other perks as well. my paid wordpress site is below.

 http://marcuscurtismusic.com/

I am still developing the site but you can see some of the things you can do. One of the nice things about word press is the administrator page. you can see your traffic. You can see where people came from what pages they clicked on what links they clicked on while they where on your site. all kinds of things. you can have people sign up for a mailing list ect.

All you need is an email address to get started. What you may do is create a yahoo, gmail, or outlook email account strictly for the site then use that email address as a way people can contact you. 

+1 for Wordpress, it's a great alternative to using conventional website templates. It's not that big a deal to install Wordpress in your own domain name, to avoid the .wordpress URL. 

As an aside, it's not actually that hard to learn basic HTML and CSS, it's nothing like programming, just simple rules for formatting text and positioning elements etc. Ultimately you'll get far closer to the design you want by writing your own HTML/CSS. It's a great skill to learn. Once you learn the basics of CSS, there are frameworks you can use to make your life a lot easier, like the "960 Grid." 

The drawback with using a template design comes when you want to make small alterations and changes to the design. You're pretty much stuck. Even with Wordpress, you end up having to learn how to understand PHP if you want to customize your site or rearrange elements. Whereas if you made your design yourself with HTML/CSS, you can roll your sleeves up and fine tune to your heart's content.