Well, my son recently started with Godaddy, and for slightly over a dollar/month more, it is my opinion that you can do much better with paid hosting (of course if you want to go with free, that is another matter). But I was thoroly annoyed with the first hosting company I went with and after 6 months, I saw Fred Langa recommend TRK hosting. I went with them in the spring of 2005, and I have never looked back. This outfit gives you a free phone number to call if you have any problems, as well as prompt email response. I have only seen them go down once in the the time I have been with them, and they did not lose my site; I just could not upload to it in the middle of the night one time, and indeed their own home page was not working right . . . but my site went right on working and everything was fixed the next day.
The free hosting companies (which include Godaddy if you don't pay them for anything more than your domain name) put so many ads on your site that the top 1/4 of the page is ads. If you do pay them for hosting, you can have a theoretically solid ad free site, but having gotten used to a good hosting company, I just don't think that much of Godaddy in terms of support and their "control panel" (that being one name for where you can go do set up sub domains, pop 3 mail identities, view your site statistics, etc. As to their reliability, I have no data at this point.
I do know that I have been very happy with Fred's recommendation.
As for your experience in software coding, oddly, I have not found that to be much help in my case, and I had a bunch of software coding experience long before I even owned a personal computer. HTML coding is somewhat different than what you are thinking about, and really much easier for the most part. If you want to see what the code looks like, just right click almost any page (not on a picture however) and select "view page source" to see the code on the page. However, if you are looking at an involved page (such as Eddie's) don't let it intimidate you; a plain page has very simple coding and that is why I suggested the book to get you started with the fundamentals.
As for WYSIWYG editors, I have yet to find a *free* one that gives me "clean" code; yes if you have a simple page you can more easily do with with one, but I have yet to have much success with the free ones when it comes to do anything very involved. And if you want to know what is going on, the free ones that I have tried not only make the coding unnecessarily messy, but they tend to modify any changes you make in the html code when you go to "save" the page.
So as you can see, you will get as many answers to your questions (and opinions) as there are people responding to this thread, and each will have a different slant on things!
