Don't sign long term contracts without receiving a sweetheart deal and guaranteed upgrades to the service so you're not the old maid two years into your service. When it comes to bandwidth more is always better, but it adds to the cost. However not as much as going over your bandwidth limit and taking a ride on the charged per byte train. It only has one stop, and it's not the happiest place on earth if you know what I mean.

So what else does a fresh faced netizen like you need to know about the wild wild web? Well you're going to need a way to generate your web content and a method to get it from your home system, if that's where you make it, to the web hosting provider's servers. Most hosting services now provide some form of content creation built into the backend of their software packages which means if you can't afford the latest adobe software package you're not left out in the cold.

Several different types of WYSIWYG, or What You See Is What You Get, editors are available. These types of content creation systems bear a passing resemblance to your everyday word processing program to make it as easy as possible for the novice designer to use them. Simply type in your content add colored boxes or textures where you need them and the system handles writing the code, providing the correct syntax and placing it in the correct location on your server.

These systems while not as robust as commercial applications are head and shoulders above what you used to be provided with. An old school text editor which you had to hand code line for line. Thankfully we've evolved, though some of us have more than others.

So let's say you have a desktop publishing package your comfortable working with and want to handle building your site offline before posting it for the entire world to see? Nothing wrong with that, and let me say I like your attitude.

After building your site you're going to need another piece of software to FTP your data to your hosting provider. FTP of File Transfer Protocol is the simplest most universal way to transfer data over the net. This is one place where the gods have smiled on us because there are several free FTP software packages available to make this as painless as possible.

A second option if you happen to own Microsoft office is to use the office program frontpage. Frontpage contains not only a WYSIWYG editor but also has a suite of simple easy to use upload software that most hosting services allow integration with.