Best sites for novices to build own website?

the Website Builder on Network Solutions is very straight forward.

I built my website speedysell.org through tiptopwebsites.com ($5 per month)

My friend (equally inexperienced) built this site http://justiceiscoming.org/ through http://www.webstarts.com/

Just go to w3 schools and learn some HTML. It’s a bit more time consuming, but HTML is a great skill to have nowadays.

I’m being forced into using Weebly for National History Day (convientently informed to my teacher of this change one week from the contest) and it might work for you. It’s been rather slow for me, but it is extremely easy. You have to go into the advanced editing and alter some of the CSS code to change the font and other things most other editors do with click of a button, but a basic website can be made with this without much work. Unfortunately, my website is not basic.

This looks really promising. OpenEntry.com built a catalog-builder using Google Sites and Google Docs.

http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/02/free-e-commerce-catalogs-managed-with.html
http://www.openentry.com/

We used www.web.com for a class I had, but we all had to use DreamWeaver software. I don’t know if you could use the site without that….
There was however, the option to select “build your own” which was free, and yo just had to do your own formatting. That part was pretty easy even for my stupid ass.

Thanks for all your responses.