Before you start making your website, it's important to answer some logistical questions about where your website will "live" and how much time you want to spend on it, as well as what it will say.
Think about the purpose of your website. Is it a personal blog or does it represent a student group? Depending on the purpose of your website, you will have different design and hosting needs.
If you are planning a student group website, will you hire a web designer, will you appoint a group web master, or both?
If you decide to hire web designer, it's important to remember that even after the initial "design" phase of building your website, you will probably need to change things periodically. Will you plan on maintaining the site yourself or will you hire the designer to maintain your site? Consider how often your site will be updated and how extensively: will you completely redesign it every semester or will you only need to change the contact information every once in a while?
Even if you hire a designer and have them maintain your site as well, it is a good idea to be knowledgeable about web design and web development so that you know what kinds of questions to ask your designer. You want to be an informed consumer so that you really get what you want, both out of your designer and your website.
If you want to build your own site, will you start from scratch or use an existing template or blogging site? The "CSS Layouts" portion of What Makes A Good Website? provides some examples of design templates and also some tips for designing your own site.
You may decide that what you want to focus on is the content of your site, and a custom design or interface isn't as important. If this is the case, a simple blogging software might serve you very well. For example, Blogger.com is a free blog host run by Google.com. There are also a number of popular blogging software packages that allow more customization but don't come with free hosting (and may require some programming knowledge as well as a suitable host), among them are: WordPress, Movable Type, and Greymatter.
A domain name is the address of your website. If you are building a student group website, you may want to buy a domain name http://www.yourgroupname.org instead of using the web address http://eclipse.barnard.edu/~yourgroupname or http://www.columbia.edu/cu/yourgroupname. When you buy a domain name, you are paying to have that address parked or forwarded to the domain where you actually host your website. For example, if you bought www.yourgroupname.org, you might have that address forward to eclipse.barnard.edu/~yourgroupname every time someone types www.yourgroupname.org into a web browser.
Domain name registration is like a rental. You pay to use a domain name by the year, and if you don't register the domain again at the end of your lease, someone else can buy the domain name for their own use. As you can imagine, you will usually save money if you pay for more than one year at a time.
If you decide to register a domain name, it is worthwhile to shop around. Make sure that you have access to account management features so that you can change the forwarding address or contact information if you need to. Also register the domain to an club email address or an address that you will always have access to (not your personal Barnard email address).
dotster, Dreamhost , godaddy, and pairNIC are all reliable domain name registration services. Also try buying a .Mac account
* Barnard students get 20% off the price of domain names at dotster. To take advantage of this offer, simply enter the coupon code "barnard" during the checkout process.
\You will also need to choose a host for your site. All Barnard students have access to space on the Eclipse server (also used for Barnard email) and all Columbia undergrads have access to web space on the Cunix server in addition to a separate Columbia email address. Depending on your needs, your Barnard or Columbia space might be the best choice, or you might choose a (free or rented) commercial server.
With outside hosting (which usually is not free), you can get more server space and programming capabilities as well as access to hit and referall statistics. Yahoo! GeoCities, Tripod.com, and AngelFire offer limited free hosting supported by banner and popup ads, but if you choose a host that puts ads on your site, consider the effect they will have on your viewers (will they be so annoying noone wants to look at your website?).
The gURL guide to building a website recommends Pair Networks, Dreamhost, and Lunarpages. You can also look at Web Hosting Ratings to compare services and help you choose a hosting service.
Now that you know what you want to get out of your website (more or less), you will need ot think about how it works and what it will look like. What Makes A Good Website?