Hi BRL,
I used 1&1 in the past and they were ok. A lot of people I know use
FastHosts and claim they get good service and performance.
To upload your site, you would normally use an FTP client. Good FTP clients are drag-and-drop and look like Windows Explorer (which may or may not be a good thing). If you're a purist you could use a command line FTP client... PUT, GET... ahhh those were the days.
Dreamweaver will handle all this for you. It has a built in FTP client and the site management functions are easy to use. It is a very powerful package and there's a reasonable learning curve to it. I have only toyed with it, but I imagine that if you're doing a lot of regular updates this is probably a very convenient route.
I could be way off the mark, but it sounds like you don't have much experience of creating web sites.
Apps like Dreamweaver give you a nice WYSIWYG environment to create your own site, but you'll still have to understand how to interpret and tweak the raw HTML code to get the best out of it. It's not that difficult, just something else to learn.
If you're just starting out, why not experiment without paying out big/much money?
You could try
Or...
- Buy your domain for cheap (eg. 123-reg.co.uk) and then set up a Google Apps account (free and includes web hosting) and point your domain at the Google Apps server.
All of the above have easy to use upload or creation tools and you can get a reasonable site cobbled together without going down to the raw HTML detail.
Hope this is useful. Feel free to PM if you need any help.