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The program that I use is called Claris Homepage 3.0 and I like it because it is powerful but simple. It works on either a Mac or a PC and has an outstanding tutorial that walks you through the basics of building a website for a store by actually building one for a coffeeshop. It is out of print, but you can find it on eBay for about $15. Homepage 2.0 will probably also work for a simple website. There is also an out-of-print book for this program that you can buy from a used book vendor on Amazon.com (the book is called the Visual Quickstart Guide to Claris Homepage 3.0 by Richard Fenno). As for buying a domain name, that is pretty simple (just go to www.register.com or www.domainguru.com) but first answer this question: How many people do you think will come to visit your website each month? The reason that is important is that you not only have to buy the domain name, you will also have to rent space on a server. The two primary things that will drive up your costs are the amount of space that you will need for the actual site and how much "bandwidth" will be used each month. You can tell the size of your website at the end of building your website simply by looking at the size of the file that it is. Bandwidth is that number times how many people will look at the site (putting it simply). So if 2,000 people were to view a 250 KiloBytes site (about five to 25 pages with images but not pictures) and look at all of the pages each month then you would need 500 MegaBytes of bandwidth. So you need to consider this when buying your domain hosting. For my more complex sites that receive 15,000 hits per month I pay $20 per month to a local firm called CCF Consult who build the site as well as host it. For simpler sites I go to www.findmyhosting.com and search thru the "supercheap" plans until I find one with enough bandwidth. For 2 GigaBytes per month I pay about $5 per year. I have never come close to using that bandwidth on the simpler sites. So that you can go to them to see how complex they are I will list them out along with the highest number of hits per month they have ever received: maxphillips2003.com (1,000 hits) Be advised that if you have lots of pictures (of your products) you can expect to see the bandwidth increase so try to keep those off the homepage (called the "Index Page" when you are creating the site) and let people just choose to see what they want to view from there. Hope this helps. I am in the process of doing this for a project I have going right now so I know what you are facing. My advantage is that having done it a few times it gets easier each time. Good Luck! |
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