I actually designed the first version of my website with Frontpage. It didn’t look bad, but I couldn’t get the formatting to show up right on Firefox (looked fine on IE, though). At some point I got so frustrated with it that I used a free template that came with my website hosting program. Only much later I got a real professional to work on it.

I have a general idea in mind for a second website (not a writing one) and it would be great if I understood enough to design it myself.

I used to be scared to death of coding. The trick was doing it all visually. I started off using Frontpage (much better now than it was then), which lets you basically edit the website the same way you’d edit a Word document. You can edit visually that way, and then go into code view to see what the code looks like if you want to learn (but you never have to look at code if you don’t want to).

A template from a Web host is just like a template you buy. The things to look at are the images. I’d prefer going with something that doesn’t have a lot of images in odd places (because that’s what’s tougher to modify if you’re not familiar with .psd files and editing the layers in Photoshop or a similar program). If it’s image-free, or has images that can very easily be swapped out (like images in a simple rectangular shape as opposed to one that’s cut up among several table cells), then it can be really easy to modify.

Web design has been more towards the CSS side of things over the last few years (as opposed to tables). However, those you can’t edit quite in the same way (you’d change colors and such in the CSS code).

Perhaps what I’ll do is find a free table-based and CSS template, and use them as examples as far as modifying them, how to change images, how to change colors, how to format the text in HTML, etc. It might be worth doing that with a tie-in to SEO too. I’ll have to map something out.

If the prices were $250-350, I might not say it’s worth it for someone new.

As for them being difficult, I actually wouldn’t agree. Everything I know about Web design was pretty much self-taught back when I launched my very first site towards the end of 2004. The uploading is actually the easy part, and most Web hosts will even do it for you for a very small fee (a friend’s host did it for like $5 / site) if you really didn’t want to do it yourself. Just use a graphics-based Web design program instead of trying to edit the HTML directly in the beginning, and you’ll generally be fine, and learn a lot. And honestly, I think every writer in this day and age should be learning at least the basics of things like HTML and CSS, as they’ll often help you land Web writing gigs if you understand the basic formatting elements over a complete HTML virgin.

Sorry for the rambling, but yes, I’ve used a lot of templates (paid and free). I’ve also designed sites from scratch in table-based and CSS layouts. If I could go back, get something unique, and save all of that design time by going with a totally exclusive template in that kind of price range, I’d absolutely do it; no questions asked. I’m even looking into the CSS templates there. If I find something interesting, I may be buying it / them and hiring someone to convert them into Wordpress themes.