Debbie,

Evidently I misunderstood your comment about Paypal because I thought you were talking about your payments to HostGator. As to your customers, it is true that Paypal does have some advantage in giving customers assurance about safety in buying from you.

However, I don't know why you would be limited to ecommerce on your domain. Essentially what you do with Paypal is that you sign up for a merchant account with them (Paypal) and you get the code information to put on your site. There's a little more to it--writing a thank you page, etc.--but it is simple and they collect your money for you and you can transfer it to your bank account. I see no reason for the host to be involved at all or in any way to limit your using it.

As far as Dreamweaver and cs3 (I assume you are referring to the Photoshop part of the CS3 suite), you prepare you site with Dreamweaver. Many people design with Photoshop and then write it up in Dreamweaver, but you don't even have to do your own graphics and you can set up your design and code at the same time so only Dreamweaver or some form of coding is essential. Actually, if I were you I would go to w3schools.com first and go through the html and css tutorials. Dreamweaver is a big program which does a lot of stuff and will take quite a lot of time to learn well (I prefer a simple text editor like NoteTab myself). It is a great program but with it or any other program you still really need to know the basics of html and css so you can make adjustments in the code. There is almost always something that doesn't work quite right and you need to fix it.

Good Success!

James