Although I don't keep a dedicated author's website, I run other sites. Hosting runs me $36 for six months-- that's for 240 Mb of space, 8 domains/subdomains, plus a bunch of other stuff I don't use (email addresses, forwarders, etc). The actual domain renewal runs me about $15/year per domain.
One piece of advice: never have your webhost and your domain registrar be the same entity. Back in the day, I had several friends who had their webhost handle their domain name purchase... and when the webhost fell off the planet, they had no way of getting their names back. I don't know how common that is, but I've avoided it ever since.
Back in the day, when I was running a particular fansite, I wanted something way nicer than what I could put together with basic HTML skills. So I paid an online friend, whose work I liked and who was available for hire, $50 to put something together with css that I could maintain myself. The rest of my websites are just based on free templates, and I've modified them with a basic knowledge of HTML and a little logic.
Maintenance is the biggest thing you'll want to consider--- are they able to put together something you're able to update every time you want to add more information or freshen things up? Or do you need to hire someone every time you want to make a change?
I was chatting with a friend about her website recently. She's still designing it, and was asking what kind of form people liked. I hadn't really registered how bloggy everything looks these days... I'm still stuck in the early/mid 00's with my layout preferences.
NTTAWWT-- the blog form lends itself very nicely to the presentation of certain kinds of information. But it's good to visit a number of websites and see what you want to emulate with your own, and that will tell you whether you need a $1500 kind of package, or if you can get what you want for only $50.