While cleaning/re-organizing my document folders, I took the opportunity to get my backup folders of my uploads both here and for my blog into some semblance of order. I have decided that while I was at it, the time has come for some cleanup of my blog as a whole. I currently use Blogspot, and while it has served my needs quite well to this point, I'm trying to decide whether or not to continue using that service or to completely re-build from the ground up on a new site. If anyone has any recommendations on their favorite Web hosts, I'd be interested on hearing any opinions. It would need to have the following:

• free (this is a must)
• ease of use
• readable/appealing layout
• nice selection of 'bells and whistles', features

In particular, I have checked out the site Wix and Weebly, and would like to know how people think they compare to Blogspot.

^ I've used Webs.com a few times, and I found them to be great

It's been forever since I actually made a website, but I have heard a lot of good things about Wordpress. Similar to Blogspot in that it uses a blog-type base, but it's apparently incredibly moddable and customizable. I've only tinkered with it briefly as I haven't really needed anything beyond the blog I have now, but I have several friends who swear by it.

Beyond that...I don't even know what other webhosts are still out there, when I was still making websites Geocities was still up and running, to give an idea of the timeframe. I'm hesitant to recommend Tumblr if you're after a blog-type base, because while it is, again, a blog-type base that supports pages, is absurdly customizable and more or less 100% free (Wordpress has premium features, Tumblr has some overpriced 'premium' themes but everything else is completely free)...the community there is kind of a cesspool.

Webs.com, you can customize it 100%, in any way you want, because it's your own coding.
Though I think they have like pre-made layouts and stuff for those who aren't good with coding.

If I were choosing, I'd pick one of the zillions of hosts that basically just give you an FTP login and however many gigs of free space (googling "free web hosting" gets you lots of comparison sites). It's not that difficult to build yourself a website using css and html, and it's fun. I know lots of people would rather have a premade site, though, which I totally understand - but if you do that, pick one which lets you organise things meaningfully. There are few things more irritating than trying to find a particular item of CC on a blog site, where either nothing is tagged, or everything is tagged but there are so many posts that each tag contains 100+ posts - and the only other reliable method you have of finding anything is to sort by date. Date makes sense for journal-type things which is what blogs are designed for, but it doesn't make sense for hosting content. Who the hell knows whether their favourite hair retexture was created in July 2012 or October 2011?

And tumblr is so, so, so many times worse.

I'm a big Weebly fan myself, but I'm not sure how good it would be if you didn't pay for the Premium version - I use it for my business website, so I am happy to pay for the extra features, and as you can make 10 websites on one premium account all of my sims sites use the Premium stuff as well. Even the free version has quite a lot of customisable stuff, I think.

Hey, at least it lets you tag posts. And it's customizable to the point I've seen pages that I didn't recognize as Tumblr blogs.

...That's probably about all it's got going for it, though.

Yeah, I don't know anything about tumblr customisation, so that may be awesome. I have bad memories of scrolling through someone's tumblr archives, trying to find a CC item that I only knew by name, by clicking tiny thumbnails of "artsy" pics that didn't actually show the CC at all. For fucking ages.

It is pretty awesome, I'll give it that. One could basically build their own layout from the ground up if they wanted to. (I just stick to tweaking premade themes as needed) It also loads faster, for me at least! I always seem to end up waiting for an hour for a Blogspot page to finish loading.

Unfortunately, Tumblr does not make a "Good Web Design Choices 101" class mandatory attendance. Which is a shame because there are plenty of blogs that could sure as hell use it...like the one you mentioned. :p

For a website host, I really like x10hosting (if no website building is necessary). I run my author blog through x10hosting and it's pretty speedy, though, sometimes the database fails and it can become really irritating. x10hosting will require some knowledge of FTP and all of that clutter which can be really confusing if you don't know how to work their control panel. Now, for a free website builder + hosting, I'd choose webs.com. It's very simple to make a site through their website builder, and if you don't mind having a subdomain, then I think that might be the best resource.

Thanks for the advice! I have played around with webs.com in the past, and it seemed to be a pretty decent site. I agree about tumblr, and I will stay as far away from that hot mess as I can.

I use Webs for a choir website. The only problem I have encountered was the inappropriate S explicit ads that Webs allows. It's very difficult to complain to them because as a free user there isn't a proper complaints channel. I almost removed the website and added a very prominent disclaimer to the site and after that all ads appear to have been removed!

I use the templates because I can't code at all!