Please do not take this the wrong way, but I'd advise you do not send people to w3schools. It spreads downright wrong and out-dated information. See here for why: http://w3fools.com.

..and I would seriously advise anybody against using GoDaddy. Do some research on their bad press. I wouldn't trust a single domain with them.

Use namecheap to register domains (.co.uk for $6), and hostgator for hosting ($4/m for smallest package). There are hosts out there who specialize in painless wordpress hosting, though I haven't used any myself so wouldn't want to recommend one in case they become your worst headache.

Duvelthehobbit666 wrote:

Woops. Didn't even realize nobody comes to this board. After further inspection I see only perhaps 1 active discussion then.

ThePuppyTurtle wrote:I want to start a new website for myself, It will be http://www.answersinscience.com . I would like you to recommend a free web hosing service. Please give me one that should be easy to set up, and easy to make look cool.

Saw this pop up in the active topics, even though it's old I'll still reply.

Stated desire: I want to start a new website

Actual Desire: I want my own domain name for free, my hosting for free, and not have to learn how to develop a website.

It.
Doesn't.
Work.
That.
Way.

First you need to lease the domain name from a registrar. Depending on which registrar you use, a 1 year lease should be under $20 USD. The dowside to that is that anybody who can use a whois can see your dox, so realistically you want to do a domain registration through a privacy proxy, which will cost you more like 50 bucks give or take. Per year.
I use Godaddy as my registrar.

Once the domain is registered, then you need hosting.
Good hosting is not free.
Hosting that is free is crap.

You can try bluehost. It's only half-crap, and it's about 5 bucks a month if you buy in bulk.

Then you basically have a domain, and a computer that the domain points to, but no content.

You can either spend a few years and learn Adobe Air, SQL, PHP, CSS, and HTML5, or you can get a precooked, extensible content management system like wordpress.org, drupal, or joomla. Then you can probably only spend a few months figuring it out.

If you're a noob, which I fathom you are considering you asked the question in the manner in which you did, you should probably go with wordpress.org, and don't hesitate to read a bunch of mans and faqs before you even bother to get started.

If you want to play with a CMS on your own computer, you can download XAMPP and do the installation locally, but nobody else will be able to access the site you create.