With the boom in blogging and online businesses, the demand for easy-to-use website builders has tremendously increased over the past few years. The best part is that most web hosting companies nowadays offer free site builders as part of their package. In fact, the site builder has become one of the default features offered by web hosting services and many companies are now competing by throwing in more comprehensive features like the shopping cart, a wider selection of style templates, online store, and improved functionality inside the site builder.

This is a great advantage to website owners like us who have zero or little knowledge in web programming.

To help you in selecting a good website builder, here are the factors you should look at when looking for a site builder:

- The whole procedure of building a website should be very easy as a site builder is meant for those who do not have coding knowledge. (In fact, after a few websites, you should be able to build one in 5 minutes!) It should include usual features like a site builder wizard and drag and drop.

- The website builder should be able to produce professional-looking web sites.

- The website builder should provide a wide selection of professional template styles.

- If your purpose is to enable online transactions, check if the site builder feature offered by the web hosting company includes a shopping cart, or an E-Commerce site.

Some of the web hosting companies that offer a great site builder include Web Hosting Hub, iPage and A2 Hosting. If you are looking for a free site builder for your personal blog, you can take a look at weebly, wordpress or blogspot. These free blogging tools allow you build your blog in minutes and offer a selection of templates, and allow you to add various widgets and plugins to the website. Among these free blogging tools, I like Wordpress, as it offers more customization for its users and there are several plug-ins available. The entire process of creating a website and adding content to it has become much simpler and easier.

In brief, which web host and site builder suits you best depends on the kind of website you intend to create. When choosing the right web host, the site builder is just a part of the selection process if you don’t have a website yet. Apart from that, there are other important factors to consider when choosing a web hosting company.