I see it involves handing money over for name registration and site hosting... can anyone recommend reputable companies?

Orchard Hosting

Used them for the last 7 years and never had an issue. Have also recommended them to all other people I have built sites for. Competitively priced (but maybe not the cheapest) and Tom is good with support issues (if you ever have any).

[Edited on 23/11/08 by mads]

You could try link which as the title says is free. You can have seven pages with seven pages on each. I.e 49 pages. If you want to go bigger you can then upgrade and pay.

Cheers guys. Liked what I saw on Orchard Hosting, so gone for that!

good choice scootz. like i said, Tom is great. Number of times i've gone over my bandwidth and he has just upped it slightly (in some cases FOC). Let me know if you need a hand with any of the creating aspect of the website (though Orchard do have quite a few CMS scripts you can install through their control panel and then just modify the content)

Cheers... I've no idea how to create a site - that joy now awaits!