Create a free website with a trendy, professional, mobile friendly free website builders

If you've ever needed to put together a website to advertise for a small business, your mom's B&B, or just a personal blog, you know how difficult it can be to build a professional looking website, without professional training, and without forking out a lot of money.

However, today, you can build a professional website for free, with no coding or design knowledge. Thanks to the growing use of new advances in web development technology, there are a number of easy to use, online based website builder tools. Almost all of the online website builder services and tools allow you to create a website for free, although most of the services charge monthly fees to add extra features to your website.

In this article, I'll highlight my top 5 free online website builder services. In addition, I'll explain how free online website builder tools compare to other methods of creating a website, discuss the various ways these services charge fees, and explore the pros / cons of online website builder services.

Don't bother searching the internet and reading reviews of the best free web based website creators. We've done the research - check out our conclusions on which are the top free web based website builder services.

Go There: www.scrollysite.com

Custom domain name: $6.00 / mo
Starter monthly plan: $6.00 / mo
Design style: Modern, Parallax, One Pager, Flat Design, Artsy, Portfolio, Business, Creative
Mobile version: Yes

Scrolly site is a promising new service for building a website online, and features a modern, trendy, long one pager scrolling site style. It features a remarkably simple website builder, that uses a different approach than any other online website builder, by allowing the user to choose and customize pre-styled blocks of content. Content blocks can be repeated, stacked and organized.

Go There: www.snappages.com

Custom domain name: $8 / mo
Starter monthly plan: $8 / mo
Design Style: Modern, Simple, Clean
Mobile version: Yes

Snappages uses a well developed, modern system, with great looking, responsive templates. Snappages aims to make online marketing easy by including a ton of very useful and powerful social media and SEO tools.

Go There: www.strikingly.com

Custom domain name: $8 / mo
Starter monthly plan: $8 / mo
Design style: Modern, Artsy, One Pager, Simple, Clean
Mobile version: Yes

Strikingly is a newcomer to the online website builder tool scene, and has taken a simple, no frills approach. It uses a simple, intuitive editor, and allows modern looking one pager websites to be created easily.

Go there: www.weebly.com

Custom domain name: FREE
Starter monthly plan: $4 / mo
Design style: Modern, Corporate, Plain
Mobile Version: Yes

Weebly is one of the biggest self build website tools, and gets the #1 spot on my top five list due to allowing even free accounts to use custom domain names. The Weebly website builder tool is also very advanced and easy to use.

Most online website builder tools allow the user to create a free website, but with a catch - the domain name will be a subdomain - for instance, tomsguitars.websitebuilder.com. If the account is upgraded by paying a monthly fee, the user can use a custom domain name to access their website in a browser - thus, instead of tomsguitars.websitebuilder.com, the url could be www.tomsguitars.com. Most services have other levels of service that can be had for a certain monthly fee, and will add features to the base website.

But are the fees charged by online website builder tools a good value, or can more value be had by buying a hosting package and self hosting a website. This is a valid question - most hosting packages on shared hosting services cost around $5 / month these days (based on a three year term). By contrast, free website builder tools, if using the paid upgrades, can cost between $4 and $10 per month, or more. However, self hosting a website requires a certain level of technical knowledge, and can easily become a nightmare project for those without the training. Paying a few dollars more per month could save hours or days of frustrating trouble shooting that can come by managing ones own hosting account and hosting your own website on it.

In the early days of the internet, and until just a few years ago, free website builder tools had a bad reputation *cough* GEOCITIES *cough*. There were many free online tools to build a website, but they were, well, cheesy. No one would ever mistake them as professional. So, if a business owner decided the business would make more money if it had a professional looking website, the only option was to hire someone to design, and then program, the website. And it's not cheap - custom website design and development usually costs from $5000 to $20,000, or even higher, depending on the complexity of the website, and the features involved.

Thankfully today there are many options for building a professional looking website for free, without any design or coding knowledge. These web based tools and services are possible today thanks to recent advances in web development technology. Languages such as Javascript are being used in increasingly advanced ways, removing limitations that past online website builder tools faced. Another reason cloud based website builder tools are feasible today is due to the work of User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) designers, to create web based tools that are extremely easy to use, yet also powerful enough to serve all the needs of a diverse user base.