Professional web designers don't come cheap. A good web designer can easily charge you $1000 or more for a five page website. This high cost leads many people to tackle web design for themselves. How hard can it be? Get yourself an HTML editor, throw up a website and voila! Your website is live right? Wrong! There is a lot of knowledge you need to develop before you can get your self made website onto the internet.

What is a Sitebuilder?

More and more web hosting companies today offer Sitebuilder software that takes care of all the technical details to getting your website up and live on the internet. They allow a novice to choose a built in template, select some colors, throw in some pictures, and add some text. Once these steps are done, all the novice has to do is publish their website to the internet. All the hard stuff is taken care of by the Sitebuilder software. So what's the catch?

Next to Impossible to Move your Website to Another Company.

Most Sitebuilders in use by web hosting companies today are designed to make it as difficult as possible for their users to transfer their website away. Most, if not all the fancy features like counters, navigation, templates, etc... are built into the Sitebuilder and won't work unless you have an active account with that particular company. If you want to take your website elsewhere, you will have to build your website again from scratch.

Cookie cutter approach tends to look amateurish

Sitebuilders in generally lack the flexibility to allow the website creator to create a website any way they like. Most Sitebuilders out there will lock you into doing things in one way