Using the templates, wizards, and WYSIWYG tools these sites provide, you can build a simple Web page in minutes. The best sites give you the tools to do more than just the basics, offering advanced features to put on your site, such as chat rooms and your own ad banners.

Anyone building a Web site wants the best results with the least amount of effort. The site that lets you achieve this is Homestead, and so we award it our Editors' Choice.

A Web page created at Homestead won't look like that of any other site in this roundup. Instead of the restrictive forms and templates that Xoom and Tripod offer, Homestead has a powerful WYSIWYG editor that lets you easily make your site as sophisticated as you want without coding-and all with no required ads like those at GeoCities and Tripod. Only GeoCities is on a par with Homestead in its easy-to-use tools and its ability to configure page elements. But Homestead has a slight edge over GeoCities because of the variety of features it offers, such as a chat room or a visitor poll, which you can simply drag into your page.

Homestead's Java-based editor reduces the building process to drag-and-drop simplicity. Much as with GeoCities, you get a blank editing frame with toolbars above and below the main frame. One click and you can drag in a text box, a photo, an animated graphic, or even a chat room. Once an element is on the page, you can drag it to a new location, change its size or color, or replace it. Though Homestead Editor lacks the extensive collection of images found at Angelfire, it categorizes hundreds of useful images.

Advanced users have two options for inserting custom HTML into a page, they can drag an HTML snippet window (with up to 3,000 characters of code) onto the page, or they can drag the imported HTML icon onto the page to pull in an HTML file of any size.

The dashboard of a good car puts all the instruments in logical locations and makes them easy to read and use. GeoCities does the same with its excellent WYSIWYG page-building editor, GeoBuilder. Only Homestead is comparable in ease of use and flexibility. But, because it offers more interactive features such as Web polling and chat rooms, Homestead has an edge over GeoCities.

The browser-based GeoBuilder is simple to use, your editing canvas is the main frame, and your tools are in a small frame below. Click on the text tool and a window opens up where you type in the text and select its attributes, such as font and color. Click OK and the text appears on your editing canvas; you can drag it to the desired location on the page. The method for inserting graphics and backgrounds is similar.

To start, you can use one of GeoBuilder's many page templates-such as Travel or Computers and Technology-but working from a blank screen is just as easy. Free graphics are provided, but they're not as snazzy or sophisticated as those found at Angelfire or Homestead. However, importing your own graphics, via Explorer-like browsing, couldn't be simpler. Once you upload a graphic, it's automatically stored in your account for reuse; you need only click on the graphics tool to access it. You can just as easily import previously created HTML pages, as well as GeoCities add-ons such as a stock ticker. While importing these advanced features at GeoCities is easy, it's easier at Homestead because many can be dragged into your page.

If your Web site plans are simple, Tripod will do the job. But by the time you've whet your appetite to do more, you'll max out its tools and be forced to hand-code HTML. To go beyond a cookiecutter site, stake your claim at Hometown AOL, or better yet at GeoCities or Homestead, where you have more choices as to how to build your page.

Tripod offers 12 templates to choose from to get started, but 10 of them are of very limited use because of their restrictiveness. Of the 10, we can recommend only the Personal Page, Photo Album, and Company Page to absolute beginners. These walk you through a wizard that lets you fill in elements such as your company logo and some contact info in predefined locations that you can't move. If you want to edit the page, you have to go through the wizard again.

Somewhat better are the two templates with more general layouts. These define only the look and feel of the page; you have seven options, such as text block, image, or links, to put in each block on the page. You can build a decent-looking page or string together a number of pages to create a site with a consistent style. These template pages can be edited in the free-form editor (a glorified Web-based Notepad), but, as with Angelfire, once you convert the template pages to HTML for the editor, you can't use the template again.

has a lot to offer, but putting its elements together in a pleasing way isn't always easy. A beginner can build a good-looking site with graphics and animations superior to those found at GeoCities and Tripod. But be prepared to figure out a few things on your own: Help is meager, and sometimes the forms leave you hanging during even basic tasks. If you want unlimited freedom to move and configure page elements, you're better off at Homestead or GeoCities.

Forms-based wizards in the Basic Editor lead you to Angelfire's free elements but don't necessarily show how to put them on your page. For example, when you go to Angelfire's graphics library, there's no specific instruction on how to import graphics to your page. We found that right-clicking on an image and copying and pasting its location to the form is the correct method.

Angelfire's help and FAQ documentation is sparse. When we e-mailed customer support for help, we received the same unhelpful answer in each instance.

If you are looking for an online community teeming with events, theglobe.com is worth visiting. But if you're looking for tools to build a dynamic Web page, stick with the WYSIWYG editor at GeoCities or Homestead. What you get at theglobe.com is even more rigid than Tripod's and Xoom's formats.

Theglobe.com's forms-based home page builder is limiting. Its eight templates, such as Resumé and Photo Album, are more like dictators of page style than starting points for creative page building. The Resumé template, for example, includes standard resumé categories such as experience and skills. But the finished product is laid out confusingly, making it difficult to understand which job you held at which company. By contrast, Homestead's templates are graphical guides that leave the rigidity of forms in the dust, and Xoom's are just laid out better.

One of the most basic page-building sites yet in some ways the most elegant, Xoom offers beginners an opportunity to create a page or a site easily. It delivers some notable elements, such as a chat room for your site and ad-free pages, but you'll quickly outgrow Xoom because of its lack of advanced page-creation tools. Homestead or GeoCities has a better upward path from newbie to Webmaster.

Building your new home page on Xoom is simple. You get an inordinate amount of hand-holding as you go from page to page in its forms-driven Easy Page Builder wizard. Choose a template to start: Most give you room for five text or image placements per page, and your only choice is on which side of the page you want them to appear.

The templates are restrictive in that you must choose one of the five background images each template offers and put an e-mail link on every page you create, whether you want these or not. Tripod, for example, lets you leave sections of its two layout-driven templates blank and gives you more options for backgrounds, type styles, and colors.

Xoom does offer some excellent features that many others lack. In fact, its Java-based chat room can be plugged into another Web site; all you need to do is register at Xoom, indicate where your site is, and copy the HTML code you need to place it on your page.

Call it the Levittown of the Web: row after row of basic home pages, effortlessly built from the same no-frills parts. But don't be fooled by these "starter sites." While Hometown AOL may bring quick-and-easy Web pages to the masses, it also provides ample resources for the more ambitious homebuilder. It's more flexible than theglobe.com's or Xoom's rigid editors, but it doesn't offer as much flexibility as either GeoCities or Homestead.

With AOL 4.0's Personal Publisher, a standalone application that integrates with AOL, beginners can design their first page in minutes. There are more than 40 templates to choose from, but that number is deceptive. All contain the same four basic elements-text, links, images, and bulleted lists-which you can add, delete, and move, so that in the end, it doesn't matter which template you choose. At Xoom, for example, you can't add or move template elements.

Not surprising for an AOL product, Personal Publisher emphasizes ease of use. Revisions, for example, are a snap. An on-screen window lists all of the elements on a page. Choose one and make the changes; Personal Publisher displays the result.

But the price of simplicity is-well, simplicity. You can't add guestbooks, frames, forms, or even counters as you can at GeoCities and Homestead. And though the program lets you choose the order of the elements, Homestead Editor's drag-and-drop interface provides a greater degree of control.

A free home page is often all about you, but if it needs to be all about "us," you may want to try a Web community, club, or virtual office space. Focused less on aesthetics and more on ease of use and communications, communities can be up and running in minutes. Standard features include built-in chat rooms, message boards, shared calendars, link lists, and photo albums. Usually you choose whether your site is open to the public or kept private.

For overall functionality, choose Excite Communities. Its file sharing and customizable welcome page beat out Yahoo!'s.