I need some advice on setting up a personal website [closed]

Question

I currently have an account with wordpress. I was happy with that untill I realized that I cannot do what I planned to unless I pay about 100$, which I cannot afford now.

My requirement is this.

I need to be able to make posts, which could contain pictures and media, and group those posts into pages. There must be a static menu thingie at the top of the page that helps navigate across these pages.

In wordpress, in order to group, we would have to create custom themes for a page. A theme would have PHP code to play around the content. However, we would have to pay for hosting in order to upload the themes. This is where I started looking for other options.

What is the best way to go from here? Should I look for other blogging sites that offer the custamizability that I seek, for free, or, should I look for a free web hosting site?

In either case, I need recommendations.

I can manage with little programming (as much as the wordpress theme page PHP programming), so I need something not very programming intensive.

Answer 1

Whether on Wordpress.com hosting or some other good host, you'll have to pay a good amount yearly. The minimum I paid was $25/year at ASmallOrange. And there is the domain cost too. That's around $10-20/year for a .com domain.

So if you want to cut down the cost, get a minimum priced hosting, and install the Wordpress software in it. Then you can manage everything of the site on your own.

Answer 2

Have you tried looking for some free hosting anywhere ?, for wordpress you will need hosting that has PHP , MYSQL. I am not sure what you have in the USA, but in the UK you get a small amount of hosting bundled with your internet package usually, this would be ok for you if you have the same thing over there. Other than that there are a few free ones here :

http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=free+mysql+php+hosting

Most of them depend on some kind of advertising to support them although there are some that are just free with no catches other than not having a massive amount of space / bandwidth per month.

Answer 3

First of all, you can try services like blogspot, altervista, tumblr, also wordpress itself, etc. That offers you blog hosting service.

Or you can buy a domain that costs ~10-30 euros/$ per year and install your blogging software. And if your blog has many visitors you can also think to add a banner to raise some money with for example adsense.