Many web design companies have ready-made designs available for use as templates. You can purchase one, modify the art with Photo Elements, Photoshop or ImageReady and do the design and programming using FrontPage or similar consumer level software. This will require a lot of trial and error, including modifying the art and getting all the pages and links to work correctly. If you’re software savvy and are comfortable using a template, then you will probably benefit from the low cost of purchasing a template. The drawback, of course, is that these templates are used by others so your site may end up looking a lot like other sites.

The second template option is to go with a host that has its own templates. SpinSite (http://www.spinsite.com) is a good example of this type of host site. All of their software for designing and managing a site is online. Nothing needs to be downloaded to your computer. You simply sign up and login to your own space. From there, you select a template and modify it interactively, changing the navigation, adding your own logo, integrating photos and words and testing everything before it goes live. There’s a wide assortment of features to select from, including blogs, discussion forums, guest books, site statistics and an online store. These packages are priced competitively, ranging from $4.95 to $29.95 per month, depending on the features you want. An online store runs $9.95 extra per month on SpinSite. Other hosts offer similar features.