[fraction]

I like to develop my own web site at home. I have never done anything like this before but I want to venture into this area. I have no clue even how to begin? Are they free or do they cost? What software I may need? can anyone point me in the correct direction. Thanks in advance!

[etaf]

there are free and you can create a website using just notepad
What you need to learn is HTML
There are hundreds of tutorials on the web for learning HTML also books in libraries etc.

have a search on google for HTML Tutorials for beginners
heres a few
http://www.w3schools.com/
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/tut/lessons.html
http://www.lissaexplains.com/

[php guy]

Websites are free to a point. You need some kind of software to make them, and a basic program for doing this is as stated: notepad. A pure notepad made website is free. If you want to really get into the design world, you should get better software, like dreamweave, photoshop, and if you like, flash. All this high end software does cost money, but if you continue to use it, it's money well spent. Once you have all the software, you don't need to pay anything more to make the web pages.


Now, once you made the site, you need a way to host it online. You can get free hosting, but this way is never very reliable, just spending $3.00 a month can give you tons of nice hosting features, and your own www.name.com domain.

There are a few nice tutorials online for learning html(the web page language), but in my opinion, a nice book is better. The book I always referee when learning html is called "in easy steps". It is a very well written intro book, and show you the markup structure of html, and all the basic stuff you need to know. Once you've read through it, learning more html is easy.

Good luck and have fun.

[fraction]

Thank you so much for all your assistance. My adventures will begin soon.

[PJK]

Webpages can be built by almost anything. There are many sites that offer templates and you need absolutely no knowledge of HTML. www.freewebs.com is one example. If you want to learn HTML, I recommend it, because you can do so much with it. Once you learn HTML, you can host it pretty much anywhere for free.

If you are looking to have a domain name, then you can get free hosting, but you will have to pay for the name ($5-$25 a year, just depends). If you need any help, just LMK.
Pat