Free website tools?

A couple years ago, I created a website using a service provided by Microsoft Office Live. The service and templates were free, and they hosted the website for free; I just had to pay for the domain. Well, they decided they weren't going to do that anymore, and my site is GONE.

Talked to a designer that we do business with, and he quoted $1200 for a single page site, and $2500 for a four page. While he does really nice work, it's just not in the budget right now.

A "free website" google search lists a billion results. Any suggestions?

I don't know about hosting, but wordpress is easy peasy to deal with.

I'm on a Mac, and iWeb works great for beginners. There are a lot of cheap hosting services out there (GoDaddy for instance) and free ones as well, though I have no experience with them. If you can use iPhoto or iTunes, iWeb will be no challenge.

If you have a copy of your old Office Live site, Microsoft Expressions is pretty easy to use. It's WYSIWYG, but you can also see the HTML. That will be the easiest way to get the site rebuilt and ready for publishing.

If you have the files somewhere and the hosting domain, I can put the two together for you and publish it to get you back online.

If you buy hosting from GoDaddy, or any of those with a linux shared host you can usually have WordPress, Drupal, Joomla or any of those installed with a click on the control panel and set up a nice site in a few hours if you know what you are doing.

If you do not - they have a site builder tool and it costs "something" but not much.

If you just have web hosting somewhere and need a page with a few pics, some contact info and so on... you can whip that up in Open Office to get something in place while you weigh your options. If you are really stuck - PM me.

Oh, and here's a good article with some other options that allow you to create a site without creating a site. Like setup a facebook page or a blog.

Article

Damn...I'd do it for beer

the mozilla seamonkey browser suite is free and has a nice editor that you can do WYSIWYG or code. i use it for things where editing code is advantageous before printing things out.

Yeah, I'm am HTML clueless, so I'd need a "insert photo here, and text here" type affair. I think I did a pretty good job on the first one. Took me a day, and a few people were impressed with how professional it looked being done by a guy who had no freakin clue what he was doing. Doesn't need to be fancy. The last one was a home page with hours and relevant text to get us in the #1 spot for people searching for us, an "about us" page, contact page, and map.

Looking at godaddy, it certainly looks like the "easy" button.

for hosting, i'll plug the one i use: www.angryhosting.com

hard to beat a dollar a month

depending on how long you'll be working on the site..you might get away with using the free trial copy of dreamweaver from adobes site, to make your site. keep it in "design mode" (you can have a view that shows your code, and theres a view that splits your screen into code and design) and just use one of the built-in templates to make your site

actually, now i think of it, get a free wordpress theme and work it from there, thats pretty plug and play these days. check smashingmagazine.com (its a design blog) - they regularly have posts like "10 cleanest new wordpress themes" etc etc. So should be easy to pick and choose what you like

In reply to poopshovel:

Check out 1&1 instead. I had to do some sites through GoDaddy and their customer service left a lot to be desired. InMotion also had really great customer support and a great WYSIWYG site builder.

I did one through yahoo small business. Nothing fancy, but it's 90-bucks every 2-years and their tool is easy to use.

I use weebly.com. It is as plug and play as it gets as is completely free though they do have a version which costs a little bit and adds some extras. The only cost I incurred was the domain registration through godaddy.

I have a blog, a web store, and I am able to generate a little income with google ads. Pretty easy peasy to set it up.

I decided on godaddy. It's a bit more of a pain in the ass than I expected. The windows live one was way more user friendly.