Markie,
Thanks for the good write up of the website information.
I also recommend GoDaddy. They are a great place to register a domain. I have my domains registered with them, also my Home Owners Association's website (
South Riding - Home) is registered there (I am the Chair of the Website Committee), and the Opera Guild of Northern Virginia (
Opera Guild of Northern Virginia - Home)
(I am their volunteer webmaster)
I have limited experience with GoDaddy as a hosting company. The Opera Guild website uses them. I have my websites hosted by Host Gator (
HOSTGATOR WEB HOSTING - cPanel, Reseller, and Dedicated Website Hosting). They have hosting for $5/month if you prepay and offer coupon codes. My servers at Host Gator use CPanel which is a fairly simple to use website administration utility. You use it to create email accounts, install components, create databases.
We are running Joomla for my Home Owner Association. I am not a big fan, but it is fairly easy to use. I was not involved in the setup, so I don't know how easy it is out of the box. My websites are all hand coded in Microsoft Visual Web Developer. (
Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition). Microsoft just released a new version. I assume that it is still free, but haven't checked it out lately. I use it both at home and work.
I hope this helps.