If you are looking to put up a web site, but don’t want to hassle with buying a domain name and hosting consider a free option: Google Page Creator.

This service allows you to create a small web site using Google’s WYSIWYG editors which are hosted entirely by Google. From their description:

Google Page Creator is a free tool that lets you create web pages right in your browser and publish them to the web with one click. There’s no software to download and no web designer to hire. The pages you create are hosted on Google servers and are available at http://yoursitename.googlepages.com for the world to see.

Of course, since the pages are hosted by this particular Google service, you will only have control over the subdomain (i.e. “yoursitename” in the example above) and will not be able to change “googlepages.com”, so business web sites should stay away.

This is an ideal way to put up a simple page and have it hosted for free for someone looking to make their first web page. You could then take the resulting pages and move it to your own domain name and hosting if you decide to later.