For general information sake, you never need to pay money to own a copyright. Technically, everything you create is copyrighted, sans very generic items such as a piece of paper with "Hi!" on it. Well, technically even that is copyrighted.
The important thing to do is always add a copyright notice to works you want copyrighted. That simply lets people know "hey, don't steal my stuff." If you really need stuff documented, then the US government does offer a copyrighting service that costs $25.00 per item. Kind of expensive, but there's a trick people in the business use.
Okay, so it's $25 per item, right? Well, what about a CD, DVD, or tape? Yeah, you can hold a ton of photos, literary works, movies, whatnot on those types of media, but if there's one CD, that's one item to copyright. Pretty simple, eh?
Most everyone I know doesn't use CDs or DVDs. Instead, they use standard VHS tapes. The reason is simply because CD/DVDs aren't proven to be good archiving mediums, whereas tape uses traditional film (and therefore is). So, just grab a camcorder, and start making a tape of all of your works. You just need to get a general sense of the work (like a photograph or painting), enough to be recognizable. There's no need to spend 20 minutes filming one thing, just a quick shot will do.
For websites, you can submit the code in the same manner, but really, you're changing the code so much that it wouldn't do much good. Maybe you could copyright the CSS, but again, that should change. Just post a little ©Copyright 2004 "Your name" and you'll be fine.
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