Nowadays it’s getting easier and easier to build websites. Gone are the days when your only web design tool was the HTML editor. It’s even possible to create a website or blog without using the HTML editor at all.

If you simply want to play around with website creation, then try one of the "paid" services as most provide free trials as well. So whenever you decide to go ahead, there's no more learning curve to worry about.

There are many ways to build your online presence through building websites such as:

• Hire a webmaster to do the work for you. This obviously can be costly.
• Hire a freelance webmaster at www.elance.com for example.
• Use mix-and-match website building system.
• Build your own.

Surely the path you choose will depend mainly on your own expertise and budget.

Building Your Own Websites

The choices are:

1. Build a static website or,
2. Create a blog. You may choose free blog services or build your own using your hosting server.

Popular free services include WordPress and Blogger or BlogSpot. These free services may have restrictions that don’t go well with your goals so do proceed with caution. Pluses are that you need to do less maintenance in this scenario.

If you’re inclined to use own domain, among the favorite blog platforms are WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. While you’re having a lot more control over your site, it also means you will need a lot more effort in creating and maintaining it.

Blogs have taken over static websites due to several factors:

• Easy to setup.
• Easy to update contents.
• Features are simple to add.
• There are plenty of free blog services available.
• Mostly favored by search engines.
• Has an advantage in pinging and trackbacking.

Just Don’t Go This Route

Also gone into history book is free website services such as Freewebs, Geocities, Tripod, FortuneCity and many many others. So I don’t recommend that you choose them them build your web presence.

There are several reasons for not favoring this including:

• Having URLs that end with yoursite.tripod.com  and the like will give "unprofessional" impression to your website visitors.
• The providers tend to stuff your web pages with ads that may not suit your site target visitors.
• Another big minus is that you don't have the liberty to design a site as per your liking, in most cases. You’re stuck with limited layout styles and templates.