Can anyone recommend a starter website building tool for novices?

Try wordpress.com. If you don’t know how to build one yourself, than you want to focus on content and not design. In addition to it being for blogging, you can actually build Web sites with the page management tool it has.

But if you want to get in to designing one, the Wordpress platform is also a good starting point after you learn a bit about HTML and CSS. People have made some amazing designs for it and made some great, complete Web sites with it—not just blogs.

Also there are loads of help and tutorials for how to use Wordpress on the Internet and even a Wordpress for dummies book at B&N.

If you have a mac the built in iWeb is easy. Dreamweaver for pc- but takes a bit more effort.

Also agree on wordpress or blogs.

Tumblr.com is very simple and great for blogs as well as photos/art. They have special posts just for images that makes it really easy.

Also here is a nice theme for Tumblr that would work really well on an art/photo site:

http://photoboard.tumblr.com/

Yahoo has a very easy one.

I was on my iphone and did not read that your site was for Art.

Please be sure to clearly watermark all your images that you place on the internet. It is vital as there have been repeat attempts to pass legislation that will orphan artwork as public domain where it can then be used by anyone who wishes on advertisements and products without crediting or reimbursing the artist.

If you do not know how to watermark there are many ways to do it.
I have been using this program which will not only add a watermark but will also re size images to web size. It takes hundreds of images and processes them in seconds into a new folder so they are web ready.

Again- regardless of what program or software you choose to go with PROTECT your work.

Google Sites has to be one of the easiest was to create and host a site. And it’s free.

Or you could just put them on Flickr .

Joomla!