– 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 don’t do much photo editing so we gave our Photoshop Elements away some time ago, but we were thinking about buying the new version just so we could use Bokeh. Then we read the reviews at Amazon.com. People are saying that the old version is almost as expensive as the new, signaling high demand for the old.

Newer isn’t always better, and this is true of many programs. One user commented that Photoshop Elements appeared to reach its peak in Version 3. Most user comments say the newer versions are too complicated. A marked complaint was that the later versions display tiny type on a black background. Even people with excellent eyesight complained about straining to read it and urged people not to buy the program until Adobe fixes it. We noticed they haven’t fixed it and it’s been out for 14 months. Why do companies sometimes gunk up a nice program and make it worse in new versions? Why to sell new product, of course.

Meanwhile, back to Bokeh, which lets you do things like focus attention on a person in a photo while blurring the background or simulate fast action without the use of a special lens.  Check out their gallery at Alienskin.com.

Ray Turley, an 82 year-old New Zealand woman, got a new career when she started taking tutorials to learn how to turn photographs into art. Now she sells around twelve canvases a year, she says.

Landscapes are her big sellers. She learned how to use Corel Painter and Photoshop from tutorials on Karen Sperling’s latest DVD, called “Painting for Photographers.” We were impressed by Turley’s art. You can see it at tinyurl.com/artmag1.

You don’t have to know much to follow the DVDs. They go step-by-step. But you will need patience to learn the full bag of tricks. The DVD isn’t cheap at $140, but it’s probably cheaper than tuition for art lessons.

We’re constantly being pitched to write about upgraded video editing programs, like Nero, version 11, but frankly, we find the free ones easier and just about as good.

Joy recently made a video using the free “Live Movie Maker,” which comes onboard with Windows 7. If you use an earlier Windows system, you can also get it from Explore.Live.com; click on “essentials” to find it. It’s so easy to use, an eight year-old could probably make a movie with assorted video clips and pictures. We dug a bit further and found a raft of other free creation tools at YouTube.com/create.

The latest one, WeVideo, lets you add special effects, titles and animations to any series of video clips and still pictures. It just arrived this week. In coming months, they’re going to offer a paid version that lets you buy music for your videos and collaborate with others. The music will probably cost $10 a song, which sounds high but it’s cheaper than copyright-infringement suits.

There are currently seven other free video editors at YouTube.com/create, including “Go Animate,” which lets you make a cartoon without any drawing skills. Choose a scenario like the 2012 election or “Office Gossipers” and off you go, selecting actions from menus and typing in comments for your characters.

If you use Windows, the most popular font manager is “FontCreator” from High-Logic. Use it to make your own handwriting font or add logos and signatures to an existing font. It’s free to try, $65 to buy.

The new “Inkling” could be a real boon for artists. Draw on ordinary paper and everything you draw is saved in a digital version, thanks to a special wireless drawing tool and a receiver that clips onto your sketchpad.

The Inkling is a $200 gadget from Wacom, the leading drawing tablet company. It costs more than their more common tablets but this thing can capture 1024 variations in pressure, and export your drawings as vectors. Vector drawings are great because they can be scaled to any size without loss of quality. Lots more info at Wacom.com.