People get intimidated when they think about web hosting, but with a little time and effort, you can have a nice website to share with the world wide web. Before you start shelling out money for a domain and web space, you need to decide what you need a website for and how detailed you plan on making it. For most users, there are plenty of free resources for personal sites.

If you just want a place to share family photos, there are free places to upload pictures, like www.photobucket.com or www.villagephotos.com, that are user friendly. You simply browse and upload the pictures and then you can send invitations to friends and family to see the pictures. It also gives you the code to post the pictures to forums, and within websites.

If you want to move a step up from just sharing photos, than there are free blog sites, where you can have an on-line diary or journal, where you can share daily thoughts and pictures. People can subscribe to the blog and receive e-mail notification of new entries. Sites like www.Xanga.com, www.blogger.com and www.myblogsite.com are some of the free blog sites available.

There are also many free website hosts where you can put together personal websites. Most of the free hosting sites provide templates that allow quick and easy website building, without having to know any HTML or java coding. You plug in your information by following the simple directions and a few minutes later you have a nice looking website.

A couple of the more popular free hosting sites are Yahoo's Geocities and Bravenet. Both sites are user friendly and can include things like webcounters, guest books Most free sites can only be used for personal websites, but they are a great way to get started in website design. A few of the free sites do allow people to set up small business sites. Many Ebay people take advantage of these types of sites. While they have templates you can use, if you become more adventurous, you can use simple web design programs and develop nice looking sites.

When you build your site, you can also find almost unlimited free clip art, buttons, bars, backgrounds and other graphics that you can use on a personal site. You have to make sure the graphics are free to use and listed as royalty free. Most free graphics site stipulate that they are free to use, as long as it's not on a business site. Some ask that you simply provide a link back to their site if you use their graphics.

It is pretty easy to build a nice free website if you make use of the resources available.