If you're a photographer looking to build a website inexpensively, here are some tools that come highly recommended:

Wix: http://www.wix.com/ - Free Flash-based website builder
Other People's Pixels: http://otherpeoplespixels.com - Specifically for artists and photographers, $16/mo
Snap Pages: http://snappages.com/ - General website creation, also used by photographers/artists, $8/mo
Folio Twist: http://foliotwist.com/ - Built specifically for artists, $30/mo

How to Build a Web Site from Scratch

This is intermittently technical, but for those of you who might be tinkerers, Lifehacker has a good overview of how to build a website from initial concept to completion without any prior knowledge. If you're an autodidact or just want to pick up a few tips, this is a pretty good read. Check out the full article here.

Afforable Web Hosting Roundup

Lifehacker (one of my favorite blogs) has a roundup of readers' votes for the most "Popular, Reliable and Affordable Web Hosts." If you're looking for inexpensive web hosting for your small business or personal website, this is a good overview of potential candidates. Check it out here.

Google's Webmaster Central Blog

If you want to dig deeper into the whys and hows of web crawling and indexing – those obscure yet important processes that determine where your site ranks in search engines – go straight to the source at Google's Webmaster Central Blog. If you aren't already familiar with Google's Tools for Webmasters, it's a great way to view all the information Google has on your site, including really important stuff like inbound links.

Google's Webmaster Central Blog is a good spot to learn about changes in Google's policies and updates to Webmaster tools. Do like I do and subscribe to it with your favorite RSS reader - mine is Google Reader, but there are plenty of others out there, and your web browser itself may allow you to subscribe to RSS feeds.

GoDaddy's Questionable Tactics

An interesting (if long) investigative piece on how GoDaddy uses a second company to warehouse and profit from expired domains. Many registrars auction off their customers' expired domains, but this article alleges that GoDaddy jumps through some unusual hoops to cover their tracks.

I've discussed the domain name selling game in numerous classes, as well as some of the tactics of companies like (GoDaddy competitor) Network Solutions. It's an odd business, and the real money is no longer in the registrations themselves, but in all the add-on services, auctions and other fees that the registrars try to extract from you.

A recent trip into the Network Solutions site management console for a client of ours who needed a domain redirected revealed an innovative advertising strategy: As a paying customer, I could not even reach the management screen for the domains without first viewing and opting out of an account security upgrade. I was given the choice of either purchasing the service or I could "Continue Unprotected." Talk about tasteless, fear-based advertising!

Sadly, this is becoming standard practice as domain registrars turn over every cushion to find those last bits of change. Your best bet is to buy just the services you need and studiously avoid the barrage of upselling.

Simple file sharing and syncing

If you've been looking for a simple way to synchronize files between multiple computers, share files publicly with family and friends, or just keep a quick, drag-and-drop backup of your most valuable files, you might want to check out Dropbox, which recently launched out of beta.

Dropbox is about as simple and elegant as it gets; I've been using the beta for a few months and it's a breeze to move stuff around. It's nice to see something as complex as file synchronization handled so straightforwardly. Check it out here.