What website builder is the best in terms of professional-looking, easy-to-use and free or low-cost?  Weebly, Wix, Hub, Wordpress, Squarespace, Sitespinner, Homestead, Adobe Muse, Google Sites, Hub, WebStartToday, Web-Builder, Intuit, other?

To learn from my experience and that of many of my clients, stay away from do-it-yourself website solutions. As attractive as they may be you will find yourself in a hole with regret after the site doesn’t perform well. I’m not saying to hand-code it either. WordPress.org self-hosted is the way to go.

Site Build It is terrible. You will have it for a year or two, want to make improvements and addons and find out you cannot. I’ve already moved 2 clients away from it into WordPress and both never looked back. Site Buid It is modular/template driven – not a bad thing, just the code they use is from the 1980′s era of markup and just plain awful. Also, if you want anything custom, you’re screwed. You can’t custom modify their template system – and important thing to do for proper SEO.

I’m a WordPress developer and designer. I used to hand-code all of my websites a long time ago but learned WordPress is by far the best system I’ve come across for low cost, fast web development. WordPress is also highly SEO-friendly out of the box and easily convertible into a full blown Content Management System website. You also will want to host your own WordPress site.

DO NOT get a WordPress.com account either! It is a free blog service, but like Site Build It, you cannot modify it and you cannot have a single domain name for it either. WordPress.org is Open Source and free to use since 2003. It is community-driven, well-maintained and when installed right, it is very secure.

My last piece of advise: get someone knowledgeable with web development and SEO to do it for you. Not pushing my wares on you, just telling you the hard honest truth. Save your time for things you do well and forget about building your own site. You will find your investment was well-spent when your site performs as planned.

Hope this helps.

Wordpress self-hosted for me too. I’ve tried a lot of others and have always had problems until I started to use Wordpress.

I am currently using Joomla for my clients and am about to move my website to Joomla as well (from GoDaddy/WebsiteTonight – which is totally unflexible).

@mikecunningham

Cheap, professional-looking and easy to use…
Buy a url and set-up hosting.  Install Wordpress and pick a theme.  Wordpress.org is only customizable if you pay extra.  You may as well pay $10 for the custom url and $5-10 a month for hosting.  If you need help or have questions, let me know.  I’ve done it about a billion times. =)

@mikecunningham

For a DYI website WordPress is a great option.  They have lots of free themes to choose from. If you want to choose your own colors, backgrounds, etc. use that in your search criteria.  http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/tag-filter/ There are ways to change other design elements if you have a basic understanding of CSS.

@mikecunningham  I’m chiming in for WordPress … but it’s not just a do it yourself platform. Lots of high powered site run on WordPress – CNN and Time magazine run some WP sites. 28% of all new sites being built are being built in WordPress.

Also you can add on to WordPress … If you think that maybe a year from now you’d like to add e-commerce to your site … You can add a e-commerce plugin to your WordPress site and with some configuration – you now have an e-commerce website.

There are forums, e-commerce, membership and many many other possibilities for your WordPress website.

@mikecunningham – I also like wordpress but built my own site on ipage.com (uses Weebly Premium drag and drop builder) and found it really easy to use and customise. It also lets you add as many pages as you want and is easy to update.

And, believe me, I have very little technical knowledge and patience!