It seems like everybody and her cat has a Web site these days. My furr-kid, Hercules, is no exception thanks to a new online tool called Weebly.

Hercules' Weebly Web site
Click image for a better look.

While Web sites are easier than ever to build today, good ones still take some work and good, old-fashioned know-how.

What they don't necessarily require, though, is programming knowledge.

People often think they have to buy expensive tools to build their Web sites. Dreamweaver, for example, is an industry standard, and it's great if you have $400 to spare. And that's just for the program. You'll still have to shell out the money for hosting.

While Dreamweaver can be easy to use, you need more than basic Web-building knowledge to take advantage of its full potential. Plus, it's kind of overkill for a personal site, and perhaps even some small business sites.

Back to coding and programming.

The newest Web-building tools do that for you.

Case in point, Weebly, a Y Combinator company that's causing quite a stir in the online world, is a Web-based, drag-and-drop tool that does most of the heavy lifting for you. It doesn't get much easier. (By the way, Y Combinator is a company that specializes in supporting fledgling tech start-ups. They're always looking for the "next big thing.")

Weebly.com

Add to that the cost for Weebly -- free -- and you've got yourself a great service.

Like any good Web site, Weebly is a work in progress. The team is hard at work, adding options and making the tool even easier to use.

In the past several weeks, for example, they've revamped the user dashboard and launched an integrated blogging tool.

But let me go back to the beginning.

Signing up for a free Weebly account requires nothing more than a username, a password and an e-mail address.

Click the Create a Site button and you're in business. Type in the name of your site and click the Continue button.

From there it's pretty much a matter of dragging and dropping. The tools are fairly self-explanatory.

From the elements (pictures, video, maps, text and such) to the design to the settings, everything about your site -- and you can create more than one -- is managed online.

You can set the site address or use your own domain. (Registering a domain costs about $10 a year or so, depending on which registrar you use.)

Weebly.com

The Weebly editor makes building a page as easy as clicking and dragging.

You can change designs with a click of mouse.

Need to add a page? Or two or three? Just click the Pages tab and add away. Weebly makes it very easy for you to add not only pages, but also blogs, which are all the rage.

Once you're ready for your site to go live for all the world to see, just click the Publish button. There's no confusing FTP. (Who even knows what that means?)

I built the little site for Hercules (OK, you caught me. He didn't actually do the work.) in about 20 minutes.

Just a few clicks here and a drag-and-drop there is all you need to add photos, text blocks, YouTube video, Google maps, ads, a feed reader and even custom HTML, should you be so desirous.

It's very slick -- both the tool and the output.

Because it's Web-based, Weebly works the same on a PC and a Mac. It also means you can update -- or completely change -- your site(s) from any computer with an Internet connection. (I wouldn't recommend using it on a dial-up connection, but those are becoming less and less common, with the exception of my father.) You don't have to worry about having all of your Web files, because they're all stored online.

Weebly is a great tool for making great-looking personal sites, but I would not recommend it for small businesses. There's just not enough customization. Yet.

There are several designs themes from which to choose, and you can customize them to an extent, but there are limitations.

If you're looking for something a little more ambitious, consider SiteKreator.com. There are a couple of different account options, ranging from free to $40 per month, which includes hosting, which is often the biggest Web site expense.

If you're looking to build a site for a small business, but don't have the cash to hire a designer and programmer, this is a great option.

The Business and Power packages ($20/month and $40/respectively) let you brand the design with your own logo, graphics and copyright. With the smaller plans, you can add that those things as content, but cannot brand the design itself.

Flexibility and features depend, of course, on the package you choose, but SiteKreator is reasonably priced and makes creating and managing your site easy.

SiteKreator.com

The SiteKreator interface relies more on menues and pop-up windows than the drag-and-drop style of Weebly.

SiteKreator's tagline pretty much says it all -- "Instant site! Just add content."

And it's true.

Like Weebly, SiteKreator is Web-based. While Weebly offers basic help, SiteKreator offers a variety of tutorials. With both services, you can pretty much figure what you want to do by clicking around, but if you get stuck, SiteKreator has the better tools to get you unstuck.

Where Weebly favors a mostly drag-and-drop interface, SiteKreator relies on menus and popup windows. You're still just a click away from adding content in an easy-to-use environment. SiteKreators's text and image insertion tool, for example, is very much like a Microsoft Word document. The icons and functionality will be pretty familiar.

Weebly and SiteKreator are cousins with a similar goal -- to get you online quickly and painlessly. They are Web publishing platforms. To that end, you can't bring in your own completely original design. These tools are not meant for that. Besides, if you had your own design, you probably wouldn't need them.

The tools are comparable. It just depends on your needs and wants. One more thing to consider is that Weebly lets you create and manage several sites from a single account; with SiteKreator, it's one site per account.

It comes down to this. If you're looking for something fun and easy to build your little corner of the World Wide Web, Weebly is definitely something to play with. It lets you add pretty much anything you could want with just a click of the mouse. (Plus Weebly is just fun to say.)

For a clean, professional-looking Web presence for your business (or yourself), SiteKreator, which seems to take itself a bit more seriously, is a great option.

Give them a click and let me kow what you think!