Design Articles

www.thesitewizard.com/webdesign/index.shtml
This site has a ton of good and often humorous articles. Of particular interest, check out his Beginners Guide and 7 ways to Annoy Your Users

www.entrepreneur.com/ebusiness/buildingawebsite/article201528.html
Best quote – “The fantasy people have a lot of times is that they’re just simply going to be able to call a web designer and say, ‘Make me a web site and show it to me in two weeks when it’s all done.”

www.webpagesthatsuck.com
Learn from others’ mistakes

www.ratz.com/featuresgood.html
He’s got a nice basic do and don’t list

smashingmagazine.com/2008/01/31/10-principles-of-effective-web-design/
A great article on creating a site for usability

www.inkkdesign.com/resources
Excellent articles on planning a site and working with a designer

Ecommerce

www.paypal.com
For simple ecommerce, a great place to setup an account so that you can take credit cards and sell product and services online. Google checkout offers a similar service.

www.practicepaysolutions.com
One of many companies that offer shopping cart, merchant gateway, inventory and customer list services for a monthly fee.

www.zen-cart.com
Open source software that can be installed on your site, so you can set up inventory and handle sales. You will need the help of a developer to get it set-up, but it does give you a way to manage your own inventory and sales. Works with PayPal or a merchant account.

Blogs

Several sites that are set up so you can have a free blog without having to setup your own. Your site can have a direct link to these.
blogger.com
thoughts.com

wordpress.com
This site can set you up with a free blog, or if you go to WordPress.org, provide free software so you can set up your own blog on your own hosted site. WordPress can also be used as a content management system.

Free Software

Filezilla, an FTP program http://filezilla-project.org/ (You want the client, not server.)

FireFTP, an FTP program that works as a Firefox plugin, right in the browser. http://fireftp.mozdev.org/

Irfanview, a nice easy to use piece of software for editing image files. Not a replacement for Photoshop, but an alternative if image cropping, resizing, etc. is all that’s needed. http://www.irfanview.com/main_download_engl.htm

Gimp, a more complex, open source alternative to Photoshop. http://www.gimp.org/

Crimson Editor, a text editor for coding in HTML, PHP etc. Different parts of the code show up in different colors making it easier to read. http://www.crimsoneditor.com/

Komodo Edit, a Dreamweaver like open source software for creating and editing web pages. http://www.activestate.com/komodo_edit/

Miscellaneous

http://www.whois.net
Where to find out who owns a domain name and if yours is listed properly.

http://www.dmoz.org/
A human edited search engine. Submitting your site here can increase visibility in search engines.