Seeing as the end of uni is just around the corner, I made a website! It's pretty minimal, really just for prospective employers to see my showreel (once it exists, currently its just a link to my "Octopult" demo), and see/download my CV.
The domain cost just under £8 from goDaddy and the hosting I got with my friends hosting plan (so chrishcarter.com is hosted by danfountain.com which is hosted by catalyst2 ) and that cost £12. So total yearly cost is £20.
For the editing and maintenance of the website I downloaded filezilla for the FTP (how you upload your page onto the internet), gedit to edit the html (the code the web page is written in), and firebug for debugging the site and looking at other peoples code.
favicon is great to get whatever image you want into the correct size and format for the favicon (the image to the immediate left of "http://.....) in the address bar. (genfavicon is also good).
issuu is good for uploading documents onto your website. It emails you the embed code and just paste that into your html and it works. And registering for it is a pretty easy.
