Glad it's not just me can't work that out.

Hi CS,
I'd also suggest leaving 1&1 alone, I created my first company website with them but as my business grew I found their "simple" hosting packages no longer met my needs. Then, when I tried to transfer my domain-name to a new web-host it took weeks of irate emails/phone calls to get them to release it.

If you don't want to invest in a web-authoring tool like Dreamweaver or MS Expression you can create simple html web pages using MS Word, although the html code is quite clumsy and not guaranteed to display in all web-browsers exactly as you've created it. Then, if you subscribe to a reputable web-hosting company you can simply use their online menu system to upload your newly designed web-pages, setup email addresses, etc. without any expensive software at your end.

Heart Internet offer inexpensive hosting packages (about £45 per year), have a very simple web based site management interface and plenty of online help/tutorials to get your site uploaded and online.

There are also plenty of great books available like the For Dummies series, or from publishers like Wiley and Que, that will tell you everything you need to know.

However, if you intend to continue creating your own web pages when you have the spare cash in the future I'd recommend investing in Dreamweaver and taking the time to learn it. I did and it led me away from Flight Operations and into my own software company!

T/O W

As well as the other advice, use CSS for determining background colour and so on - it's much easier to change later if necessary. Also consider downloading and installing a web server onto your PC, so you can make sure it works properly that way. There are web sites around that attempt to load images from a local path - something like 'C:\images\myimage.jpg' which of course doesn't work for other people. Another common problem is that if the place you upload it to is running Linux, then file names are case-sensitive so MyPage isn't the same as mypage.

Finally, make sure your pages meet the HTML & CSS validation at:
http://validator.w3.org/
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

These are not perfect, but will pick up a lot of common problems.