I am coming up on the end of my host contract and am wondering which direction I should pursue. I have Macromedia Dreamweaver, but it is not as easy as they make it sound.

I have checked out Website Builder for Easy Website Design Software and Allen Hills site. Does anyone have any good hosts with good web builders? BTW my previous host was Lunar Pages and it worked well.

I do web design and web development profesionally,
I can tell you that Macromedia Dreamweaver is one of the best tools for web design. It might be hard at first, but once you get familiar with it, it will get much easier.
A very good combination would be to use Adobe Photoshop for the graphics, and for the web design/coding Dreamweaver.
If you want to include a content management system or some dynamic features, use php for the programming/coding part, and mysql as a database management system. Both are free, easy to use, and you can find plenty of tutorials for them on the internet.

Find a good tutorial for Dreamweaver, there are also plenty good ones on the internet (for free).

As far as web hosting servers are concerned. You need to be more specific about your website, meaning , how much traffic will it generate, will the users be doing any heavy downloading, do you need a lot of disk space.

Are you planning on making the whole website by yourself

For html, use notepad. Or gVim, my favorite.

Have both firefox and ie installed and with web dev kits installed. I hate firefox, but I love how it shows errors on the webdev kit. Pretty cool.

Simple site. If I could write HTML then I probably wouldnt be looking for a web builder would I Dallen?

I have a book on Dreamweaver as well, I guess I could just get more involved into it. I do have photoshop and that proves pretty tough to use as well.

What did you find wrong with it? I have had 2 others say it was good. Not discrediting or anything. Its nice to hear both sides of experiences. Thanks

For your purposes you can find a web hosting service for around 50$ (even less ) per year, that's very cheap. There are a lot of web hosting companies that offer very cheap web-hosting. And because you just need to run a simple site, you won't need anything fancy and expensive.
I don't want to advertise nor favor any company. Just lookup 'web hosting' on google, and you'll find plenty of cheap ones. Most of them are pretty reliable too.

If I were going to get another host I would renew with lunar pages most likely. However there ez site builder is crap and I was hoping for something a bit more user friendly.

Go to

Joomla!

I have use joomla on a bunch of projects. It takes a little getting used to. But it is really easy once you get the hang of it and you do not need to know code very well at all.

It is php based and runs off of a mysql database. The program sets itself up, all you need to do is add contend, change templates or css. Pretty easy in the whole scheme of things.

Joomla Templates Club - Pro Joomla Templates & Designs - Joomla is a template club. The forum there is a great help. I have never even needed to post a question. All answers are dealt with in a very timely manner. The templates are very nice, very easy to use and come with great tutorials. They have everything you need to start a joomla site. The cost is $75 per year. It is more than worth the money with all of the help in the forum.

Just my 2 cents. Joomla is what I used until I understood coding a lot better. It has been a very good experience.

X2
I agree
Joomla is simply great for building content management systems and similar web applications.
It's free, as easy to use as it gets, and it looks great.
But I think he just needs a simple website coded in HTML, and doesn't need to dinamically manipulate the data and the content on the webpage.
I haven't tried using it for making a plain web site.. but it's worth a shot.

Just making a simple table in Dreamweaver, putting a fancy background and adding some hyperlinks and some text will do the job.

Ya I was working on a form last night in MX and discovered its really all about tables. However when I would click on advanced layout or whatever it is, I couldnt get a new table to appear. Back to work on that.

But I will say that I will need a list database and that an email program would probably be good.