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As someone who has done web design and web coding for the last 8 years for a wide variety of clients, I have come across a wide variety of clientele who have the assumption that to create a website, one must have a degree in design or programming and far more experience than they have or hope to possess. Quite the opposite is actually true, and creating a website can not only be fun, but much easier than you think.

It helps when you start the process to already have in mind how you want to go about the design part when you create a web site. Having graphic software is helpful, but truthfully no longer entirely necessary today if you are just creating a simple site for yourself. Many free image sites are out there that can resize the images for you or even add graphic effects, or provide changes such as changing your photos into black and white images.

When you create a website, there are a wide variety of services across the internet both for free web hosting and for paid web hosting. For someone who is new to creating sites, it may be more beneficial to set up with free hosting initially as you learn the skills to create better and better sites. The benefit in using free hosting services is that many of these sites also have free HTML editors.

The best HTML editors for those who are entirely new to designing websites are the WYSIWYG editors. This is short for "What You See Is What You Get," which means that you can lay out any of the elements for your pages onto the screen and see what it will actually look once published in real time. This is more convenient than straight coding the site by hand in a .txt file for beginners that aren't familiar with the terminology.

As you become more advanced over time in designing and coding, in time you may consider using different software other than a free WYSIWYG editor to create your sites. There are editors one can use that are combination WYSIWYG and viewing the code used to create your site. As you grow to learn more complex coding, these may be more efficient than what a straight WYSIWYG editor can accomplish.

In any case, learning to create a website can be a fun and challenging pasttime. As you grow more skilled in creating for the web, you can even grow to offer your design skills for sale in helping others create sites. This is how I started with web design back in high school, and today I do this for a living. While it takes patience and experimentation, in time, it is a fun skill that anybody can learn to do.