Best website to create your own website?

web.com maybe?

Shopify.com and Godaddy.com both have easy setup e-commerce.

Squarespace hands down.

With a focus on cheap, you might be better off just using godaddy.com, 1&1, or similar. These will allow you to basically build your site for free and the hosting charge and .com/.net name licensing fees are not too much. The downside is, unless you've got graphics skills, your site is going to look pretty JV using the free templates. If you're cool with that, this is your best cheap bet.

Moving up from there in cost, Wordpress & Squarespace have both been mentioned and are both viable. As with anything (iPhone vs. Android, rock vs. rap, etc.) there will be fan boys that strongly favor one platform over the other... sometimes with good cause. Here's a link to an article that provides a reasonable comparison:

LINK

A summary: Squarespace is a proprietary platform with good customer service and the products are tightly integrated and updated frequently (sort of like the iphone ecosystem). Wordpress is open source and you may be able to cheaply get up and running, but you also have more freedom to customize things to create something really impressive... with the massive asterisk that you choose wisely and have good help. To make something impressive, you'll need to rely on various, potentially expensive plug-ins and have to seek out help from the community, which can be great or can be a roll of the dice (a little like the non-homogenous Android ecosystem).

As mentioned, in terms of building the site, pretty much every avenue you choose will have some free templates, though commerce sites can move away from free quickly. So, you should be able to put a site together yourself with some effort... I haven't been on Squarespace, so am not sure about templates, but understand there is a nice What You See Is What You Get web building tool(s).

One possible cost-effective way to get help with building your site is to go on to Fiverr.com. There's a whole section of people who advertise that if you give them content and a logo, they'll throw a 5 page site together for you for $5. I'd imagine commerce sites (credit card payment acceptance) will have a premium fee tacked on, though I'm not sure. Just look for people with good ratings, click on to them and you'll see if they have add on fees for further customizations... you really shouldn't expect to get a world class site made for $5, but some of these people are very skilled and can most likely make you something better than you can make yourself for not too much money.

Lastly... you mentioned online payments... If you want to accept credit card payments, you will most likely need to be PCI compliant. I think it's a legal requirement when you store credit card info as a matter of security (to protect customers). Not sure if this is something you'd pay a monthly fee for to the hosting service or if you'd subcontract that out to a security company (who would have to have access to your site). You may be able to get around this if you just accept payments via Paypal... Paypal is itself PCI compliant, and if you accept payments through them, you wouldn't need to store card info and have that liability... I'm a little uncertain of the details of what I've written in this paragraph, but it is something you need to look into. Or, perhaps someone on here who's been down this road might give you a more sound answer than I have here.

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If you want to accept credit card payments, you will most likely need to be PCI compliant.

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PCI compliance is only a concern if your shopping cart stores payment card numbers. The vast majority of small to medium sized online stores don't do this.

Probably the easiest way to accept online payments - at a very low transaction cost - is to combine any website builder with PayPal Payments Standard. The solution make it easy to add "Buy Now" buttons to any web page. Its shortcoming is that the cart doesn't link to real-time quotes from UPS, USPS, etc., so shipping rates are based on weight and Zip code estimates that you create.

I started my first online store with PayPal Payments Standard, and kept this simple cart until revenue got big.

Above all, I recommend that you avoid any eCommerce solution that adds a transaction fee of its own - beyond the 3% or so that your payment gateway charges for handling payment cards.

There's a detailed blog on this subject at www.moonlightceo.com.

I used bluehost to purchase my domain and create my website and it was cheap and easy. Customer service is good too. Haven't used anything else so I can't really say if it's the best, but I would shop around and see who can get your domain for the cheapest

wix. so simple to use

Squarespace

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Nice post. Sorry I fat fingered the upvote on my phone and down voted you. I wish I could change it.

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You can change your vote. You just upvote, refresh, upvote again, refresh again, and the downvote changes to an upvote.

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You can change your vote. You just upvote, refresh, upvote again, refresh again, and the downvote changes to an upvote.

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Good to know. Have an upvote.