Free hosting and web creation has its limitations

For those of you who are just getting their feet wet in the web site world, there are many great companies that make creating a website easy and host it for you and it is completely free.
However, your site URL will not effectively move up the popularity charts on bing or google because it will be under their company domain name. You can set up the SOE for your site to maximize your hits on searches but your site will come up under the creator and hosting companies name with your site in the subtext for the most part.
Wix.com is a great site for setting up a website with easy drag and drop and tons of design possibilities. is another great site builder and hosting company. I prefer them to wix although I have sites with both. It is just much more user friendly. You can live stream presentations, documents, YouTube videos create photo galleries, use GoogleAdsense, input html which allows you to to affiliate marketing very easily. The only thing I prefer with wix is that you can place your items where ever you want on the page and link them to which ever pages you want. However, you cannot see what the html content actually looks like on your page until you publish your site so I find it is time consuming because you have to keep going back and forth from the editing page to the live page. With Weebly everything is shown exactly how it will look published in real time so editing is much easier. Unfortunately there are limitations as to where things can be placed and how your page will look. So for linear pages, I use Weebly and for pages that I want to be more free to place ads and content in various places, I use Wix.

If you decide you want a domain of your own to increase traffic, the free website builders and hosters will register your own domain and continue to host for a fee. It is quite reasonable and very convenient if you have already spent hours building your site and are happy with it.

Other free website building companies that I have come across are: Google, Yahoo, www.moonfruit.com, www.webs.com, www.web.com, www.yola.com, and www.350.com.

I encourage you to check them out for yourself!!