Webspace, Website Tips Please!

I finally got a name for our website, its going to be M&C Reptiles. I am going to start working on a website and need some server space for a few months until I can get a domain name up. Is there any good free place? Or is there anyone that can lend me a little bit of space? I don't need much, I will just be hosting pages on there. (Pictures will be hosted on PhotoBucket)

Also, What is appealing in a reptile website to you? What makes you go WOW! Thats professional.

Thanks for any Tips and Info,
.
Ryan McCullough
M&C Reptiles

Ryan,
I mean no offense, but a website (with the intent of selling) hosted by a free server will very rarely make anyone go WOW!

I would recommend that you wait until you are ready to "premier" your website and then do it in a professional manner.

You can secure the domain for under $10.00 at most discount domain sites. www.godaddy.com is a good one to work with. You can also set up a reasonably good hosting plan there for under $10.00 a month. However, I would at least consider looking at the hosting offered by Fauna. For $100.00/year, (I believe it is also available on a monthly plan), you can get a top of the line hosting plan with all of the bells and whistles.

As an added bonus, you will receive some exposure on a very popular reptile-related website. Trust me, it's worth every penny.

Once you have the basics in place, feel free to ask any questions that you might have about web design. I'm sure that you will receive all the help that you need from everyone here. If you have any specific questions, feel free to post them, or you can contact me directly at: mike@reptiliandreams.com

I'll be happy to help you any way that I can.

Who is you ISP?

My ISP offers a free 5Mb website that I have used to test out different website designs. You may want to see if yours offers something as well.

Thanks for the advice everyone. I am going to wait and design my pages, logos, write up terms ect and prepare to purchase hosting.

Thanks.

I have an ad here for just what your looking for. I do web hosting and for reptile related sites I offer a special deal of just $60/yr and that includes the domain name registration and everything. There are specific details on my website but I just want to say that I am NOT a reseller of some big name hosting solution. I run (even build) my own web server(s) and handle all support issues in a personal manor.

-Check it out and if you have any questions...even if you don't want to go with my services I will be glad to answer them.

I get my domain name from GoDaddy.com.
I use Suprasshosting to host my website - it is the best I've used and it has support out the yin yang.
As far as actually building the website, if you don't know how to do anything, the easiest thing to do is use Geocities page builder. Sign up at geocities.com and you can use the easy page builder on there to create your page. Publish it and then go to view>source and voila.. you have an html page without any of the hassel. Just erase the whole "Created by yahoo" stuff so you don't look silly infront of the cool kids.

Read up on FTP programs and download one like cuteftp or smartftp.

Upload your html (that you saved in notepad as a .html file) and you have a created webpage that costs 6 bucks a month for hosting and that you paid 10 bucks at godaddy.com for domain. You don't have to worry about relying on a webdesigner nor do you really have to know anything about what you're doing.