Virus from websites?

Can you really get a virus from a website? ya know just by visiting it? it seems like you can but I didn't see anything specific, like on that protect yourself post altho I dont understand half of it lol.

I think I did one time, in a game people told me in ooc about a program to download to capture video in a game, I think it was like fwaps? but said when I dl I had to regeister for a license to be able to use it more than 30 sec, so when I looked for it I google something like fraps license, in order to find it, and went to hte first or 2nd website on the list, thinking it wouls be okay since I went to it through google and not anything that looked shady, but after that McAfee and spybotsd went weird detecting a virus it said, stopped working and the browser took me to a site to buy new antivirus. when I restarted to fix it said there was a missing dll32 file or something like that. It wouldnt even start in 'safe mode' or nothing, but someone was able to fix it for me although I lost everything. even my edition of windows lol. At least I got to keep my PC and not buy a new one lol.

Anyway so now I have CA Security center, it comes with Link Advisor but it makes mistakes sometimes I think, for example zam.com is a good site fore game info even tho Link Advisor gives it a red flag. How good is Link Advisor? I'm really afraid to visit websites now. For example I've seen links on youtube saying that at boxofvideos.com you can watch movies, trailers, etc. does that website seem okay to you guys?