If you're not sure how useful a website is going to be for your business, or if you're just on a very tight budget, you may want to try out one of the many free website creators available on the web. These are websites which allow you to build and host your website on their servers for free. In exchange, your website will probably feature links, frames and/or banner advertisements for the company which hosts your website, as well as their partners or sponsors. Be warned: there is no such thing as a free lunch, and you will usually have to pay if you want to go ad-free.

There's been an explosion in the number of free website building and hosting sites available on the web in the last couple of years. In this article, six of these will be considered: Yahoo!'s GeoCities, Lycos' AngelFire and Tripod, Bravenet, Freewebs, and Google's Page Creator.

AngelFire and Tripod are both owned by search engine company Lycos. AngelFire is more marketed at young people, while Tripod has a more adult and professional image, although both are based on what is ultimately the same underlying software. While AngelFire used to be well-known for offering free, no-adverts hosting, now both hosting services plaster the pages of free account holders with banner advertisements and pop-ups. The site-building tools are basic but effective. Ad-free accounts with extra storage start from $4.95/month.

Yahoo! acquired GeoCities in 1999. Since then, various improvements have been made to the service, and it is quite fast and reliable. Users can now opt not to have pop-up advertisements, but advertisements still clog up homepages to a surprising degree, and many users give up because of alleged terms of service violations, about which Yahoo! is unusually strict. Paid accounts can be acquired from $4.95/month.

Bravenet offers a raft of web creation tools, including blogging, counters, password protection for restricted pages, email forms, forums, RSS feeds and calendars. Again, its service has been vastly improved over the last few years, and some of the website templates are excellent. Banner ads are not as intrusive as those of some free hosting services. Upgraded accounts start from $4.99/month.

Freewebs is probably one of the most feature-rich free site building and hosting services available. Again, the banner ads are relatively non-intrusive when compared with those of other free hosts, and there are dozens of widgets, counters and other features you can easily add to your site, as well as Paypal integration, member email lists, forms, directories, RSS readers and more.

Google's Page Creator is unusual in that there are no advertisements displayed on any web pages created with it. A stylish WYSIWYG interface makes creation of a small, simple, static web site very easy, there are several extras offered (called "gadgets", you can also edit the HTML or upload your own pages, so if you have some technical knowledge, you should be able to create something that looks good without being plagued by advertisements. Page Creator is still in beta.

By Natalie Catchpole

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