This is going to be a kind of long post, but this is sorta in my wheelhouse. I’ve been a web developer for about fifteen years and have experience with a lot of different tools.
There are three main things you need to decide up front:
[ul][]What you want the site to do
[]How much you’re willing to pay
[*]How technical you are[/ul]
By “what you want the site to do,” I mean, do you want it to just be a one-page placeholder? Do you want to publish a blog or journal there? Do you want to be able to actually share some of your free stories? Do you want to sell your own books right there on the site?
The next two–the cost and your technical comfort level–are somewhat intertwined. The more you want to do for free the more likely you’ll have to get involved with HTML, the web’s markup language, and possibly much more. Making a functional web site that isn’t eye-punchingly ugly requires you to grasp not only basic HTML but also CSS (style sheets), and bluntly, it requires you to have enough design skill to know how to put those together.
At risk of moving past blunt into brutal: what was considered perfectly acceptable in 1998 looks lazy in 2014. If you aren’t sure you can design a better-looking web page than what you can get with an “out of the box” blogging platform, use the blogging platform. It will probably not only require less work on your part, it’ll look better.
WordPress
At last count something like 23% of the web runs on WordPress. It’s not just a blogging platform, it’s a full website content management system, and it’s not that difficult to use. And it’s highly customizable through the use of “themes,” many of which are also free and some of which even offer extra functionality.
Hosting with WordPress.com: You can create a site for free at wordpress.com. If you want a custom domain (something like my ranea.org rather than something that ends in .wordpress.com), you can map a domain you’ve already bought for $13 a year, or have WordPress register it for you and map it for $18 a year. There are other upgrades you can get from them, up to and including the “Premium” package for $99 a year that includes pretty much everything except paid custom themes.
Hosting it somewhere else: There are many other services that offer WordPress hosting, usually for a low monthly cost, and they offer one potentially big advantage over WordPress.com: they let you install WordPress “plugins” for extra functionality, which WP.com doesn’t support. (WP.com’s hosting includes some functionality that you only get through plugins on other WordPress installations, though.) Keep in mind that while $99/year for WordPress Premium sounds like a lot, that works out to $8.25 a year. Also, if you host WordPress somewhere else, read the note about hosting under “Roll your own.”
Tumblr
Yeah, yeah, it’s all about sharing cat GIFs and getting upset about social justice, but Tumblr is actually a terrific blogging platform: it’s highly customizable, they don’t put ads on your blog, and they let you bring your own custom domain to it for free. (You still have to pay for the domain, but you don’t pay extra to them.) Check out Coyote Tracks, my tech blog, for what a Tumblr can look like. And, Tumblr has a lot of social features that other blogging platforms don’t support: people can follow you through Tumblr, like your posts, and share your posts with their followers.
The downside of Tumblr is that it’s pretty much only a blogging platform. While you can make static pages with it, your “front page” will always be your blog. This isn’t necessarily a problem as long as you think you can update your blog at least once a month, but if you’re worried you just won’t have that much to say, it might not be a good choice.
Other “Full Service” options
Blogger is one of the oldest blog hosting services still in existence. As a Google product that Google really doesn’t care a whole lot about, it gets fairly little love and there’s little to recommend it over WordPress.com.
Squarespace is in a lot of ways a dream service: elegant, handsome themes, drag-and-drop site creation, optimized for full sites rather than just blogs (although it has blog-specific features), and did I mention drag-and-drop site creation? There’s nothing else that can make a site this good-looking this fast. And if you do want a storefront, it’s built right in. Downside: it costs all the money. Plans start at $10 a month (with a 20% discount if you pay annually). If you can afford it, though, it’s definitely worth looking at.
Ghost is, like WordPress, both the name of blogging software and the name of a blog hosting service. Ghost is very young but under active development and has a quickly-growing community similar to WordPress’s (just much smaller at the moment). It’s promising but unlike WP, there’s no free hosting service available, and it’s expensive as Squarespace while giving you fewer features.
LiveJournal has the same “from another era” problem that Blogger does, only more so. If you’re not already there it’s probably not worth starting one at this point. LJ’s silver lining is that it has a surprising number of professional science fiction writers who still regularly use it to this day. It used ot have a strong furry presence, although that’s slowly dwindled thanks to FA’s journal feature and, more recently, Tumblr.
Yahoo! Web Hosting lets you put together a site with minimal effort for under $6 a month. It’s relatively basic, but does more than you probably imagine something with the Yahoo! brand name does. If you plan to do updating more than occasionally, though–or want more flexibility than a handful of hard-to-modify stock templates, this and other similar “site builder” services may drive you banana crazypants.
Rolling your own
If I haven’t dissuaded you from trying to make your own site, well, okay. You’ll need to find a web host of your own, which will probably cost you money, and you’ll need to learn HTML if you don’t know it.
Hosting: You’re going to need some place to host a site. Nearly all hosting services will be Linux-based (or some other Unix); this doesn’t mean you need to know anything about Linux, but it does mean that if something gets fubared, Linux knowledge may help. Even some of the sites that advertise “one click WordPress installation!” expect you to be able to log in and muck around with things. Cheap hosting services tend to be, well, cheap.
The alternative is the time-honored one of finding a friend to host a site for free. Advantage: free! Disadvantage: your friend may get sick of providing you tech support real quick. Also, you’re entirely at the mercy of whatever technical choices your friend makes. This is not always a plus.
Editing HTML: There are two kinds of web site editors, WYSIWYG ones and “bare metal” HTML editors. WYSIWYG editors are relatively easy to use but tend, in my experience, to be maddeningly quirky (especially if you try one of the free ones). True HTML editors are, well, less quirky, but require you to know HTML.
Do not use a word processor for editing web pages. Full stop. What you want is a “text editor,” which is designed for editing plain text, and you want one that has some understanding of what HTML is. Word processors don’t use plain text, they use (usually proprietary) formatted text, and even when you do a “Save as plain text” they’re very likely to screw up the character encoding. If you’ve ever looked at a web page where dashes and quote marks had become accented letters or funny boxes, you are seeing what happens when character encoding breaks.
For a free text editor, I’d look at:
[ul][]CoffeeCup (Windows only)
[]TextWrangler (Mac only)
[*]Komodo Edit (Windows, Mac and Linux)[/ul]
Note that Komodo Edit is free, but “Komodo IDE,” its more advanced relative, is very expensive.
If you go this route, it’ll be worth your while to learn about CSS (style sheets) and how you can use them to make all the pages on your site both prettier and more consistent. And if you’re technically savvy, you could look into what’s called a “static web site generator,” a program that takes a bunch of plain text files (often formatted using Markdown, which you probably already know even if you don’t think you do) and some templates and mooshes them together to produce a web site. Unfortunately, so far most of those are aimed at developers and they range from mildly nerdy to excessively nerdy.
The tl;dr recommendation
Unless you have a compelling reason not to, use WordPress. Host it at WordPress.com. Even if you want to do it on the cheap, pony up for a custom domain and don’t be afraid to spend a few bucks on a new theme.
I want to do a website overhaul at some point but it’s a matter of finding the artwork and things like that . . . mine is wordpress Based, but I had a designer do the forest-y theme that I’m somewhat ‘meh’ about these days because I just didn’t have time to look into custom art.