Best way to create and take a website live?

You've asked a deceptively complicated question :D

My biased web developer's answer: Yes, learn to code and develop your website by hand. GoDaddy's site builder tool is... I want to be friendly about this... Not the best tool out there for creating a website. I've been hired by clients before to clean up the mess they made trying to use it. By learning to code, you empower yourself with the ability to do exactly what you want with your website.

As for all the 'extra codes ... that supposedly increase traffic'--don't worry about that stuff. GoDaddy is great when it comes to making hosting available to the masses, but it's the Wal-Mart of hosting, in my opinion, and it's always looking to sell its customers (especially inexperienced ones) junk that they don't need, and that will really just clutter up their sites and get in the way of their understanding of the web.

If you write you code in a clean, semantic way (which Treehouse can teach you how to do), Google and other search engines will have no problem finding and serving up your site in relevant search queries. If you want to pay for advertising, there are plenty of good services out there.

While I highly recommend learning front end development (HTML, CSS and JavaScript), if you want to have a blog up and running right away, you might want to consider WordPress in the meantime. WordPress is a content management system you can run on your website that will make installing pre-made themes and uploading content (like blog posts and images) pretty easy and straightforward. The cool thing is that it also lets you get down and dirty with the code itself, so you can apply some of the CSS and HTML you're learning as you go. That said, WordPress is built on PHP and MySQL, and is therefore much more complex than just a static HTML and CSS website, so while it's easy to use (posting blog entries and changing the look of your site using the built-in tools), it's not as easy to tinker with (changing the code itself, the way you would in a website you coded yourself).

If you don't mind constantly updating the HTML of your blog with new content, you can totally just build a static site. (You can also look at a tool called Jekyll for building static sites in a semi-dynamic way, but it might be a bit advanced for right now.) If you want a blog right away with the features you expect of other rich web applications, have a look at WordPress.

But yes, learn to code!

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Saud A, you're definitely trying to eat an elephant, so just be ready to to do it one bite at a time.

-I'd stay away from any WYSIWYG website builders, if you're going to be a member here. Learning to code your own will always allow you much more flexibility and creativity. WYSIWYG website builders will forever be limiting in what they can do, and the results you can get from them. WYSIWYG - What You See Is What You Get

-Godaddy is fine for hosting, especially starting out. But yes, they will try to upsell a lot of stuff. They have a lot of stuff to offer, must of it you probably don't need.

-Photoshop in Illustrator do not integrate into HTML and CSS. You can use both or either to generate whatever mockups you may need or want to make, but at the end of the day, you're still going to be writing HTML and CSS to recreate those layouts made in either program. Use them if needed to organize your thoughts, get your colors, content layout, etc.

-It is annoyingly difficult to update blogs through straight code. I'd give you about 3 months before you not only became tired of writing all of the new HTML into the web file, and than turning around and uploading it back with FTP to your server before you just give up running a blog. You're going to want to use a CMS of some sort. This sort of blog operation would also grow your blog into somewhat of a maintenance nightmare with how big, and how many web files you'd start to have. CMS- Content Management System (ie. Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, etc)

-The beautiful part about starting with a CMS like Wordpress is that the only limiting factor here is your imagination. The content (ie. your post, images, titles, etc) are separate fro the presentation. Which means you could layout, display, or change how your Wordpress blog looks or functions whenever, and how often you want. There are a lot of plugins to add cool functionality to your site, and worst case scenario you could write your own custom plugin just for you. Whatever you can think of, you can build inside wordpress. Look at the plugin Buddypress for Wordpress. It basically takes a standard Wordpress site and turns it into a social media site. Look at eCommerce plugins like WooCommerce, which again take a standard wordpress site and turns it into a well function webstore. The sky is the limit.

-And yes, gradient fading, fonts, and that kind of stuff can all be built in CSS...whether you are using wordpress or not.

Kevin's answer is top notch. It's clear that you're a beginner, and that's great. Take it slow and learn as you go. Understand that if people are able to make a career out of web development, then it's not something that can be explained fully in a quick forum post, the same way a craftsman carpenter can't explain in a few paragraphs how to design, build and sell a beautiful mahogany table.

I also want to make sure that you understand that when we talk about WordPress (or any other CMS), we're talking about running it on your own server, not having your blog hosted on wordpress.com or some other blog-only website. You get more control over your WordPress installation when you host in on your own server. You can, for example, edit any code you want to and install any plugins (code other people have written) you want.

I don't want to use this forum to bash GoDaddy, but I will offer my respectful opinion. GoDaddy has always been very limiting for me. It's not a very full-featured hosting service. You can't, for example, run many different programming languages on their shared servers. This may not seem important now, but in a few months, when your coding skills grow, this might be annoying if you need to run scripts written in a language other than PHP. Also, their support has never been that great compared to other hosting companies. They also bomard their customers with plugins and extras of dubious value, and I think that all of this only serves to confuse people who are new to running their own website, and this confusion gives GoDaddy the opportunity to swoop in and encourage them to purchase more uneeded features.

I use Site5 for my hosting, but there are plenty of other good providers, and I don't want to sound like I'm advertising on here. A simple Google search isn't always the best way to find a good hosting provider, because the big companies (like GoDaddy) have long reach and good SEO. Look for hosting companies that developers use, not ones that cater to people who don't know much about building websites. It sounds strange, but developer-friendly hosting companies are often much simpler to deal with. Also, smaller hosting companies have tended to have much better support for me.

Looking at your profile, it looks like you've just started diving into HTML and CSS. The more you learn, the more you'll understand the intricacies of web development and web hosting. I would even encourage you to build your own static blog website as soon as you feel able to, and to try updating it by editing the code every time you have a new entry. This will give you practice writing code, and it will show you how complicated it can get to maintain a growing website by directly editing static code, which will either show you the value of using a CMS, or encourage you to learn to program and build your own solution. Sometimes hearing professionals go on about why some way is the right way to do something just doesn't teach you, and you need to get your hands dirty and learn why they're right by doing it the hard way for a while. That's perfectly fine, and we all do it.

Good luck on your journey into web development. Take it slow and don't try to learn everything at once. Learn the basics and go from there.

Cole Jackowski has a good response too.

Saud A check out the treehouse blog. It is powered by Wordpress. http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/

My advice would be to follow the Wordpress Development track which provides a map in how to best eat an elephant (as Kevin Korte so eloquently said).