– Yola.com and 350.com offer web hosting, site creation tools and ready-made templates. Try out the free version online and see if you like it. Joy used the free one to create a site for an educated but non-tech-savvy husband and wife. For $500, Yola will build a site for you. You should be kind of tech-inclined, however, to be able to update and expand it.

– WebEasy 9, or Xara’s Web Designer, both $50, are nice website creation programs that you can download to your PC. Unlike Yola, WebEasy only includes three months of free web-hosting, so you’ll need to choose a web-hosting company. We use 1and1.com. But GoDaddy.com is popular and may be the country’s largest hosting service for individuals and small companies.

– Another way to go is have someone do it for you. Visit elance.com and hire a freelancer to build a basic site. Then you can use editing software like Adobe Contribute ($100), which makes web editing as easy as using Microsoft Word. When we had a special job, we got lucky and  found KerCommunications at Elance. The owner, Nick Ker, always seems to understand exactly what we want and responds quickly, usually doing the job in a day or two. Other freelance websites include the new “CoffeeAndPower,” as well as Guru.com and Odesk.  This is a nice way for people to pick up income and all but one of the people we’ve tried turned out to be pretty good.

We do online banking at two different sites, we log-on to AT&T to look at our TV bill, and then check on free Airline miles, Netflix and other sites for account info. Now we’re doing all that from Manilla.com.

Manilla is a free service from the Hearst Corporation. It puts the latest info from your credit card bills, utility payments, finances, travel-rewards programs, Netflix account, Groupon and other daily deal coupons and magazine subscriptions on to one personal encrypted page.

At a glance, we saw how many miles we had accumulated in both our American Airlines accounts, that our next Netflix movie is “Green Lantern” and that we’re a day late on our electric bill.

Bob’s doesn’t like this sort of thing because he worries about security, but Joy likes the convenience. We remember when Mint.com pitched us on this kind of wrap-up years ago and our reaction was, “Can we really trust them to store our passwords safely?” But the service took off, becoming hugely popular. Manilla may do the same. It’s gotten great reviews so far.

In fact, his approach to starting a new company is the best part of the book. In 2009, he notes, most people said that the 100,000 apps in Apple’s iTunes store were already too many. But Burris noticed that real estate was an under-served category. There were a few apps for local agents, but no foreclosure app. And yet, there were a lot of Google searches on the word “foreclosures.” So he called local universities and asked for names of their top software engineering students, offering one of them a percentage of the profits and a small sum to design “Complete Foreclosures.”

Here was the clever part. Using his guiding principle of “go opposite,” the app is free but real estate agents pay $25 a month for an exclusive listing of the properties in a particular zip code. One agent bought 30 zip codes for his listings, though the average is six.

Beyond the business stuff, “Flash Foresight” is a romp through tech history. In 1979, a five megabyte hard drive cost $1500, or $300 per megabyte. Today’s hard drives bring that cost down to thousandths of a cent per megabyte. And by the way, pay no attention to the conventional wisdom. In 1996, TIME magazine reported that the once vaunted Apple Computer Company was near death. Today it’s bigger than Microsoft and within a whisper of being the largest company in America.

We remember when people who weren’t paying cash, wrote checks at the grocery store. Some still write checks and hold up everybody in line. Most use credit or debit cards. Next step: smart phones.

“Google Wallet” is expected to arrive this summer. It will start out on the “Nexus S 4G” phone offered by Sprint, but will expand to more phones soon after.

They’ll be used with what are called “paypass.” These will be smart phone readers at merchant checkout counters. You would tap your phone on the reader itself. No, we’re not kidding. You hit the reader with your phone lightly, please and your credit identification number is recognized and the proper amount deducted from your balance. (Law suits to follow.)

We went to Google.com/wallet to see who will be participating in this new payment method and saw that McDonalds, 7 Eleven, Home Depot, CVS, and many others have already signed up. It is Google’s eventual aim to make Google Wallet a kind of digital bank, able to store thousands of credit cards, loyalty cards, gift cards, receipts, boarding passes, tickets, coded keys, etc. There will be discounts for users.

The cost for Google Small Business Apps is $50 per user per year, and includes such things as 25 gigabytes of email storage per user, online calendars, spreadsheets, data recovery, voice and video chat. That’s $450 a year for nine people, which is the number of people in our new friend’s real estate firm. She’s paying $1485 a year for InfoStreet.

Of course sometimes it’s worthwhile dealing with a small company. Our new acquaintance liked InfoStreet’s “portal” or landing page, which includes a link to an employee directory, customer relationship management tools and other stuff. She also liked the free training webinar that allowed her and her team to ask lots of questions to get up to speed.

But if we were in business, we’d do a free trial of Google Apps first. They have webinars too. You’ll find lots of info at smb.gonegoogle.com. Or go to google.com/apps/business look under “latest news” for info on the training sessions. We’d also try Salesforce.com. Their “group edition” is $15 per user per month.

If you’ve ever been to an Apple store, you might have noticed there is no cash register and no check-out counter. Employees swipe your credit card on their iPod Touch and complete a transaction anywhere in the store.

Other businesses are learning how to do this too. The iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch/Android app getting a lot of buzz lately is called “Square.” It includes a card swiping accessory that plugs into the headset/microphone jack of the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. The app is free, and each user who signs up gets a card reader; Square makes its money by charging 2.75 percent per transaction. The company is currently processing $3 million worth of transactions a day. More info at squareup.com.

“Swipe” is another app that turns an iPhone or iPod Touch into a credit card reader. Their app is 99 cents and they also toss in the card reader for free. They don’t put pricing info on their website, but we asked and they charge 1.74 percent per “qualified” card plus 24 cents per transaction and $25 a month for the service. The fee for a $100 purchase on a standard Visa, Mastercard or Discover card would be $1.98. More info at AppNinjas.com.

Bob’s new favorite TV show is “Pawn Stars,” and now he’s discovered a website that will put a price on stuff you’d like to sell them.

It’s Worthpoint.com, and it bills itself as the largest price guide in the world for antiques and collectibles. (We can’t verify this.) The site has over 70 million prices gathered from eBay, GoAntiques, TIAS (The Internet Antique Shop) and the world’s leading auction houses.

They also feature a “Worthologist” (what an awful term) who is available to answer questions. The featured Worthologist is Maggie Turnipseed (no, we’re not kidding). She started out collecting Art Nouveau hat pins and will tell you all about it. Her opinion was free but for $20, you can ask a “certified” expert what your treasure is worth. (Who certifies experts in collectibles? We think the people who do this may be certifiable.)

If you have a business, you can make your own iPhone or iPad app to lure in customers without any special programming knowledge. There are tools out there that let you select items off a menu.

One we like is “Bizness Apps,” $39 a month from BiznessApps.com. It has features you can add to your app automatically, like GPS “turn by turn” directions to your place of business and coupon discounts when customers check in to your store. We also found “Red Foundry,” which is free if you’re in the $99-a-year Apple developer program, or $39 a month otherwise.

Bre.ad isn’t for making toast but for toasting your business or cause when you share a web link.

It’s a free tool on the web. Bre.ad shortens long web site names and inserts a note the programmer calls “a toast.” The toast is your own personal billboard. Viewers see it for five seconds after clicking on the link you’ve sent, and then the tiny billboard fades out and you go to the linked page itself.

Five seconds seems like a long wait when you’re used to moving around the web quickly. But it gives the “toast” a chance to register an image and message. We tried it with a cartoon picture of ourselves and the message “Here’s the latest from On Computers.” It worked fine. We don’t have a commercial site, but thought this was pretty clever for anyone advertising their business or promoting some issue or cause.

Once you sign up and upload the image you want to use, add a message. To shorten and share a link, type “Bre.ad/” (without the quotes) in front of the address to share. A page pops up to let you share that link through an email, Twitter, Facebook and the Bre.ad site itself.

The web tool was funded by Lady Gaga’s manager, who’s obviously good at figuring out how to get publicity. It’s a clever alternative to other link-shortening services, such as TinyUrl and Bit.ly. This last one, by the way, just started adding its formerly paid “pro” features for free.