When wondering what will work to wield a wetter website, you have a several options:  Do you build it from your server, using a content management system, like Joomla, or a blogging platform, like Wordpress?  Speaking of servers, do you subscribe to a shared server, subscribe to a more expensive dedicated server, or have a server nearby?  Do you build it using the resources of a larger company, like Google's Blogger or the Wordpress site?  If so, do you stick with the blogspot.com or wordpress.com domain, or your own?  We'll address these options in the near future.

Do you build your website with an HTML editor (among other code possibilities), as well as other applications installed in your personal computer?  If you use the OS X operating system on the Mac, you can use a simple yet effective program called iWeb, available in the iLife '09 Suite.  If you need to use a more powerful webpage creator, or you anticipate you'll need it in the future, you might want to look at the pricey Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 software, with versions for both OS X and Windows operating systems.  Alternatively, you can try the comparatively-featured, free program called KompoZer.

While you're at it, a program like Adobe Photoshop CS4 ($$$) or GIMP (free!) will help you with your graphics needs.

For all these powerful tools, these are useless without tasteful use.  That is to say, if you use every trick in the book, and every powerful feature available, your website might end up less than ideal - closer to the gaudy Geocities pages of the 1990s and the gratuitous MySpace profiles of earlier this decade.  As a rule of thumb (with few exceptions):  Simple works; complex tends to fail.

Here are a few (hopefully helpful) considerations:

• When posting photos and creating supplemental graphics, remember that even in this increasingly broadband world, quickly-loading sites are better than slowly-loading ones.  In other words, keep your filesizes down.  This is one of many factors concerning site speed.  Your server is another issue...
• Learn to effectively create tables.  They are, in practice, the same sort of tables you make with a word processing program.  Be careful when adding borders, for the default HTML borders for tables look like 1990s Geocities pages.  Then again, a throwback to simpler Web times might be what you're going for...intentionally?
• Make your site more for your visitors, and less for you.  "Mystery meat" navigation icons (symbols instead of straightforward words) are good for nobody.
• While both Google and Amazon.com are extremely popular websites, consider how you use these sites, when you're on them.  Think about Facebook and Twitter, too.  If you eliminate the parts of those sites that you don't use, then you are well on your way to making a straightforward and effective website.