What is the best free website builder?

This is very true. I think you should find low cost websites to use.

What a bizarre view! Since when did whether a website will get ranked have anything to do with whether or not it's free?! And how, exactly, would that work?!

Are you telling us that free WordPress blogs, hosted free at Freehostia or Byethost or 000WebHost won't get ranked?

Or that Weebly sites don't get ranked?!

(Even I have some Weebly sites that rank very well, and I'm hardly the world's greatest SEO enthusiast).

I suggest you think again.

Lots and lots of things are "out there". Where a site's hosted and from what CMS it's made don't normally affect its ranking potential at all.

However, at Wix, there are two different kinds of sites available: HTML-5 ones (fine for ranking) and Flash ones (not so good for ranking, as even Wix themselves admit pretty openly).

What's more important than how easily they rank is how safe/secure they are to use, and what the host's TOS are. For these reasons, if you want free sites, I strongly recommended free, self-hosted WordPress blogs at places like Freehostia and Byethost, where you don't have to worry about the host deleting them.

By the way, guys, this thread's from last December. I'm "just saying".

I think you should consider Wordpress. Only have to buy the domains, WP is free and a high performance tool.

If a marketer is expecting to create dozens of sites, that $10 could easily be $200 or more bucks. That's a lot of cash in total monthly hosting fees for urls that may not even be making any money yet. It's important to invest some risk management into a business too, by lowering one's expenses and exposure where possible.

If the methods for getting good traffic to them are not going to be relying on ranking the sites SEO-wise, using a free website builder could be a good option. Promote the pages through strong follow-thru traffic from videos, social media, Yahoo Answers and the like. Not everything has to revolve around the search engines or ranking position.

And as for "owning your own land" or domain plus hosting, remember that almost nobody actually does. A domain name is something people rent for a year or more, then connect to somebody else's server space they are also renting for a fee. Depending on the policies of the registrar or webhost, they might still shut you down on a dime.

that was some great advice guys "again" people helping people

I'm with Kay. Hostgator isn't the only hosting provider that offers hosting for around $10 a month. And why wouldn't he go with shared hosting?

If he's just starting out there's no reason for him to get a VPS or a dedicated server. I still have a few sites (10+) on my shared Hostgator account and never had any problems whatsoever.

If he starts his business on a free platform like Blogger, Wix, a .wordpress site, ect, he's going to be very limited later on.

And as far as domains go, GoDaddy has $.99 coupons every once in a while, so it can be really cheap to get started. I don't think ~$10 a month is misleading at all.

Someone who asking HOW to build a site is not ready for a dedicated server or a VPS - they don't need that to get started. They need a hosting company with good training and support.

There is no "cumulative cost" of multiple site hosting as such. I know people who run 10 sites (10 domains) on one $7/month host. I run two dozen sites on one $25 shared reseller account. That's $1/month to host each site.

If you get a separate account for each site you build, of course the cost goes up. Some sites need their own account - but that's a totally different issue and not relevant for someone new to building sites.