I'm on the first stage of the front end web program. Should I be coding my website on workspaces all along?

You're very welcome! The art background is great to have for this line of work actually! Every track has their own specific courses, or set of lessons (I.E. "Build your own Website" which is the first course), so what I would do is complete each of the courses and take a break in between them.

Apply AT LEAST 1 - 2 things from each track to your first website before going on to the next course - If you don't know a way to apply it to your site make a new bare-bones site and test the new thing that you want to practice. Make the exact website Nick creates after the first course to start WITHOUT COPY AND PASTING in order to physically type the code yourself! ( obviously put your own name/colors/etc...), then move on to the next courses and start applying what you learn to your first website. That really helped me out!

Where you have the photography background, you can showcase 6 or so images like Nick does and do it the exact same way. Write a little caption under each of your pictures or maybe even use one of your pictures as a background-image for your header (If you don't know how to yet, don't worry, it'll be covered soon) There's plenty of ways you can incorporate what you learn into that first site, even if it's deleting code and re-writing it using a different assortment of selectors or applying short-hand techniques.

For taking what you know outside of Treehouse, I wouldn't recommend paying to host a website until you are more familiar with what you're doing. I would go to http://brackets.io/ and download it. This is an IDE (Integrated Developer Environment) which is also what workspaces is.

In other words, it's where you do your coding and set up everything you need. There's a whole bunch of IDE's and people will tell you how much better certain ones are over the other ones, but in reality you should just go with whatever you like. Brackets is a pretty solid one; It's very simple, there's a lot of add-ons and updates, it has a live-preview option that allows you to see your changes in real-time (and actually outlines what your working on it's pretty awesome) and the best part of all - IT'S FREE.

Use Brackets - or if you find better something better through a google search then use that software - until you do all the lessons and make your website super-awesome. Then put your website online and start building a name for yourself by working on projects!