My wife and I have been doing this a while and have experimented a lot. Our favorite crust by far is Peter Reinhart's neo-Neapolitan dough. To get the best results you want to refrigerate the dough 2 to 3 days before you cook it, and ideally have a nice thick stone in your oven and at least 500 degrees. It cooks in 5 minutes or less and is sooooo good. It is still very good with lower temps on a pan, but it is amazing with the high heat and a stone.
Our favorite is our homage to Frank Pepé's New Haven white clam pie, voted number one pizza in America on many occasions, and probably the best pizza I have ever eaten.
We often just buy canned chopped clams, since fresh chopped clams are much harder to find in the PNW than in the northeast. It may sound gross, but everyone I have fed this pizza falls in love with it. Aside from the crust, and heat, we find the most important thing is fresh whole milk mozzarella. We are happy with the kind costco sells. The sauce is just olive oil and crushed fresh garlic. You can add fresh oregano (or dried, too).
We also like fresh basil and fresh sliced tomato with fresh mozzarella, also white, but red is ok too.
My girls like red sauce and aren't picky, so we just mix canned tomato sauce and a bit of dried Italian herb mix. It feels blasphemous, but they like it.
I just had Pepe's classic tomato pie a couple days ago, first time in years. I remembered why I stay away from Pepe's; because once I start eating it I don't stop until it's gone.
For a while, home-making pizza didn't save a lot of money, because I liked buying different kit for making the stuff (stones, steels, peels, etc...). But nowadays I use the baking steel in the oven in the winter, and just cook it on the grill in the summer.
I just open a big can of diced tomatoes into the slow cooker with some butter, salt, olive oil, and italian seasoning, then blend it up a bit after ~12 hours.
I have gotten into making my own mozzarella cheese, but mainly for making no-salt-added pizzas for my grandfather that has heart failure. But making your own mozzarella is surprisingly easy, though you might have to mess around until you find milk that works. I haven't weighed the resulting cheese, so I don't know the yield vs buying a block of cheese vs pre-shredded, but I expect it's a good deal, given that you can use all the whey that's left over. One hint, you can use it in place of water in your pizza dough.
Also my guilty pleasure is, once a year, the Friday after Thanksgiving, I take some cream sauce from the leftover creamed onions, and use that as a base sauce, then top that with a bit of mozzarella, and then whatever other Thanksgiving leftovers there are (turkey, mashed potatoes, yams, dressing, etc...). It probably sounds gross, but man do I like it.
