Need website tech advice (not this website heh)

I know we have quite a few tech oriented people so I wanted to ask for some advice. My income isn't huge and I wanted to create a website. I'm a graphic designer as a hobby (went to school but had to leave... hope to start up again eventually). I can do the coding thing but it in no way comes natural lol.

What I basically need to know if there are any free sites out there that anyone has experienced that are decent? I've checked around but felt really iffy. I thought about doing like Blogger that looks like a website but then again it boils down to my not having enough Tylenol in order to code it to look how I want haha.

Any advice or ideas are greatly appreciated!

There are many free hosting solutions that exist. However, I don't have a lot of experience with most of them.

If your goal is to essentially showcase your work, www.wordpress.com might be a good option. They have thousands of customizable templates, help documentation and is fairly easy to use.

I was actually thinking a little more than showing off my work. I wanted to start writing guides for ToR. I have been working on one for the site and having a lot of fun with it. So I wanted to continue even after I was done with that.

WordPress might still be a good option. You're able to make different pages as well as upload galleries. You can check out one of my sites, kiddkasper.com that shows some of that. It's a bit sparse at the moment because I'm actually in somewhat of the middle of changing hosting providers.

Wordpress is nice for blogs and stuff, but I'm a much bigger fan of Joomla which our site runs on. Joomla is a content management system that supports a whole host of extensions and its very easy to learn. Joomla can easily do blogs as well. You may want to look into it as well.

Quote by Justjon

but then again it boils down to my not having enough Tylenol in order to code it to look how I want haha!

I think Nick missed this part.

That and the money thing. Joomla requires hosting =(

You can get hosting for as little as $3/month (I believe a Venti coffee costs more at Starbucks). If you wanted to hire a graphic designer, would you hire one that has a professional-looking website or the one with a free clunky Geocities account? Perception is reality.

Quote by colivia

You can get hosting for as little as $3/month (I believe a Venti coffee costs more at Starbucks). If you wanted to hire a graphic designer, would you hire one that has a professional-looking website or the one with a free clunky Geocities account? Perception is reality.

The site has nothing to do with graphic design. I don't professionally offer my services.

I just wanted to know if anyone had any experience with free hosting obviously no one has.

Hey Jon -

I'm at work right now so our firewall blocks access but a few years ago when I did freelance IT Support I registered my domain name and used the Microsoft Office Live service to host my site for free. All I had to pay for was my domain name registration since the actual hosting was free.

I don't have the site anymore but I remember it was easy to use. I was able to choose themes and colors through a web interface. You have the option of editing the html code if you want but if not there were a bunch pre-made themes that you can use and customize through a nice GUI.

This was a few years ago but if it still works the way it did back then it would be perfect for what you're looking for I think.

www.officelive.com/

(Store and share document online and create a website with Microsoft Office Live.)

EDIT: I just found this article on CNET from when Microsoft introduced this.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13845_3-10160295-58/get-a-free-domain-name-and-hosting-from-microsoft/

-Joseph