Am looking to design a website for my company, preferably on a free program, and am totally inexperienced. I'm going to be the only administrator at least for some time so will need to be able to have an ongoing relationship with this software. Would greatly appreciate feedback on which programs I should be looking into. Thanks in advance, peace.

Who is hosting the website? is it onsite or and a hosting company?

Try http://kompozer.net/ or http://www.coffeecup.com/free-editor/.

google html editors (free)

Hmm, your category is broad. I'll give you a couple of suggestions though.

Gimp for graphics, image maps, and initial site template. See how to design a web page using Gimp. You should read the Gimp docs to learn to properly use it.

Once I design a site I usually do the coding in Aptana Studio.

Here's one website which I designed using the above combination (note: not a pro).
http://ekeyfinder.sourceforge.net/ (download website sources)

Sometimes I'll also code in vim or Notepad++ (Windows).

EdiT:
I list out all the software I used on my website design.
http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~sag47/#tools.html

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As for the coding part, I'd suggest Kompozer or Bluefish

If you are totally inexperienced, About dot com has some good tutorials.

There's lots of great stuff about web design on the web (imagine that!), but many of the "tutorials" are overwhelming; they present so much stuff so fast it is difficult to absorb any of it.

http://webdesign.about.com/

I'd suggest you use a good word processor. They generally can make fair web pages. OpenOffice or others would do and be about as easy as it gets.

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Try this page http://tips.webdesign10.com/using-li...lopment-ubuntu

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Thank you so much for all of the advice. I went with GIMP and have whipped up something I am more than happy with.
As far as the writing goes, I think the best 3 options for me are: Aptana, Bluefish or Kompozer.
So how do I go from having a design on GIMP to putting it into one of these programs? I would appreciate any advice, whether its a link to a page that explains this process to me or some actual instruction. Many thanks in advance!

It depends on what you created in Gimp, but before you do anything I'd suggest you learn basic HTML and CSS (LOTS of tutorials online). It'll help you decide whether you need to slice the image or achieve the effect with CSS.

The basics of HTML can be learned online (it's really easy), CSS is also easy. Once you've mastered basic CSS I'd strongly recommend The Smashing Book. I found it very helpful in designing websites. Bear in mind it assumes you know basic CSS.

For some more immediate advice, it'd be easier to help you if you showed us your layout image.

Well assuming you know HTML/CSS. How I go about it is using guides.

Essentially what you do is select the Move Tool.

Click on a ruler (either vertical on the left or horizontal ruler up top) and drag down to your image.

Section off your design using guides from the rulers.

Then when you have all your guides in place be sure that snap to guides is enabled (up in the menu View > Snap to Guides).

Then create a selection using the rectangle select tool with the edge of the select snapping to your guides.

Once you have your selection press Ctrl+C or Edit > Copy from the menu.

Then you click File > Create > From Clipboard (see docs). Once you have all of your pieces partitioned you can create the HTML around the template.

As you may (or may not) know there are several ways to go about creating the web template with Gimp but that's just how I do it.

SAM

The answer can massively depend on the nature of the site...if you, for example, intend to sell stuff from your website, that massively increases the problems over a simple, static, "we are here, here are some pictures of products, here is a 'phone number for more information" type of website.

So no answer will be completely useful unless you give rather more information, because the person giving the answer may have a completely different kind of website in mind.

At least consider whether the advantages of a CMS would be worth it for you. There will certainly be a learning curve, but, from where you are today, a learning curve is inevitable (and should not be underestimated).

Which approach will be best to take depends heavily on where you want the website to get to eventually, but, in some cases, with more complex websites, written manually, you will spend your entire life following down and correcting dangling links. And someone has to have time to be the security expert...

Peace is what you will not get, unless you are careful.

Here is the link to the GIMP file. I'll post another link for a PDF on the off chance someone here doesn't have GIMP.

http://db.tt/eCF9h26i

To clear some of the questions:
- will not be selling anything
- no more than 20 active elements on any given page (no more than 35 elements total per page)
- minimal information updates needed (maybe every couple of months)

Will definitely look into The Smashing Book and have already started with the toturials. Looking forward to gettng more feedback I appreciate the help.

Peace

Here's the page as a JPEG.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8379396/TAP%20web%20page.jpg