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April 5, 2011 4:43 PM

What are the best websites to use to create websites extremely easily?

What are the best sites to use to make simple non-cheesy websites extremely easily?

Requirements:
- beautiful design
- good choice of colors, layouts
- EXTREMELY easy to use
- Does not have to be free (willing to pay)
- lets you use your own domain name, add keywords, etc.
- fancy features such as e-commerce are okay, but not required

Something like Weebly or Moonfruit, but not Tumblr or Google Pages.

posted by metametababe to computers & internet (9 answers total)

squarespace.com seems to get a lot of love for this kind of thing.
posted by jjb at 4:47 PM on April 5, 2011

Blogspot and Wordpress seem to be very popular. What kind of website are you hoping to create?
posted by box at 4:56 PM on April 5, 2011

Goodsie is a simple way to create a store. I use their other site, flavors.me to create my personal site. Otherwise what box said, tell us what you are going for.
posted by special-k at 5:11 PM on April 5, 2011

Not a blog, a static web page for a small business. Just wondering what the latest easy-to-use software is for people who don't want to hire web designers.
posted by metametababe at 5:11 PM on April 5, 2011

Wordpress. You can set it up as a plain website that doesn't look or work like a blog at all. Easy, simple, lots of templates to choose from. If you don't mind paying, go to wordpress.com, sign up, and pay for them to not have ads, and for you to use your own domain. That way you don't have to worry about security.
posted by jlunar at 5:32 PM on April 5, 2011

Squarespace is a very good option. For free, there is WordPress and Tumblr could work for you as well.
posted by xtine at 5:43 PM on April 5, 2011

I've had good luck using Weebly for my work site. It's super easy, has good design options, and does all the things you listed.

here's what I've done with it so far
posted by hms71 at 6:47 PM on April 5, 2011

nthing Wordpress as a powerful and pretty for a static site.

Alternatively, you could sometimes make do with a simple XHTML+CSS template.
posted by turkeyphant at 7:06 PM on April 5, 2011

I've used all of the above and whilst I don't use it anymore, Weebly is what I'd suggest - it's literally so easy to use that even someone with just facebook/email/word processing skills could set it up. I don't think Wordpress or the others are QUITE as intuitive.
posted by shazzam! at 2:45 AM on April 6, 2011