Hi Marjorie,
The above advice is great. Laying out and designing the page content, and then hiring someone to turn it into a reality are the hardest parts. I've had good luck with
www.elance.com for freelance work.
GODADDY.COM is a great place to register your domain. It presently costs $6.95 to register your .com domain there for a year, and they have great support.
Hosting providers will range from FREE for the fairly unreliable ones with ads to $29.95 for the best ones. The price really depends on the quality of the company and what your storage space and bandwidth(usage traffic) requirements are. Most art related web sites fall into the lowest categories offered, so it's not necessary to spend a lot. $13.95/mo will get you a great ISP.
I have used HOSTWAY.COM in the recent past and found their uptime to be excellent, although the tech support is a bit lacking. (I believe it's farmed out to India)
We moved to another company 5 weeks ago, and I pool resources to get a better price. My family has 8 domains for various businesses and it was more economical to sign up as a reseller and pay a flat fee to have as many domains as we want. (paying instead by how much space and bandwidth we use for all domains combined)
I'm toying with the idea of opening this up to other framers, if interested. (as a service, not for profit) If so, it'll be about $3.95/month for the average sized page. (with every known bell and whistle you can think of, including: CPANEL, pop & webmail Accounts, MySQL, stats, SpamAssassin, auto responders, Fantastico scripts, FreeBSD based, frontpage extensions, etc) Is there any interest in this?
Mike
PS: This should probably be in the techie forum