First, it's not at all difficult to own and build a website. Nothing compares to brick-and-mortar business environement because online business store can easily be built. 

So claim your virtual real estate (VRE) online by creating your very own website.

However, this is one of few places where I don't encourage using free services such as Freewebs, Geocities, Tripod, FortuneCity and many others.

Having urls that end with one of those will give "unprofessional" impression to your website visitors. Also the providers tend to stuff your web pages with ads that may not suit your site target visitors.

One other big minus is that you don't have the liberty to design a site as per your liking, in most cases.

If you simply want to play around with website creation, then try one of the "paid" services as most provide free trials as well. So whenever you decide to go ahead, there's no more learning curve to worry about.

There are many ways to build your online presence through building websites such as:

• hire a webmaster to do the work for you. This obviously can be very costly
• hire freelance webmaster at www.elance.com for example.
• use mix-and-match website building system
• build your own

Surely the path you may choose will depend mainly on your own expertise and budget.

If you prefer mix-and-match route, you need no prior knowledge here are a few choices that you can explore:

SiteBuildIt!

One of the most popular systems around.

Bigpixie.com

There is a 10-day free trial for you to play around with the system.

Here's a short list of the 30-plus features:

• 1,400+ designs 
• shopping cart
• multimedia
• photo albums
• message board
• mailing list
• autoresponder
• verisign certified

Homestead.com

It's features includes:

• 2,000+ website templates to choose from
• Accept payments 24 hours a day through PayPal
• Start with a complete, functional site, including images and text
• Get all the flexibility of designing your site from scratch without the hassle! Add or delete pages, change navigation labels, and add links wherever you need them. Change the fonts, , images, text, and background colors.
• Get your own personalized "domain name"
• eCommerce-ready

Next: Building Your Own Website - Part 2