also, if you've built a website, please share a link and tell me the builder software that you used! Thanks!

Wordpress would be my suggestion.
Simply to use with almost zero code skills for the beginning. Far as I am concerned go that way, use their servers and you only pay for your domain and it is rock solid and well supported.

My suggestion would be Wix.com or Wordpress. Both have tons and tons of templates to start from if you prefer. Granted, my use of them wasn't for architectural design per-say but the same principles apply.

Wix has a great interface that is easy and intuitive to work with (think of drag and drop).  I made a very simple music site for my hobby band in 20 minutes without ever using the program before.

My wix example site:

https://www.drivewaysymphony.c...

My wordpress site for my freelance work in the entertainment industry:

http://www.oliversfx.com/

This one is a little more complex and thought out but there are a lot of Wordpress sites that are very easy to work with.

Good luck!

I've used Cargo for years. Geared towards creative folks.

Wix

I used wix for my design thesis portfolio, its easy to use, manage and share. and its free.

https://ar0313.wixsite.com/des...

You can also have the visitor count based on Ip and all other good things..

I use Portfoliobox, it's pretty good, though the free version only gives you 50 images. Paid version is about 6-8$ a month depending on the time interval you pay for. my website as an example

squarespace

+1 squarespace - clean templates, easy to use. 

I'd use Steve from accounting

I use Wix and have done for a while. Its great because you can set one up for free and only then once tested you can pay to link your domain to it. 

Use Wix if you only need a simple website. For e-commerce use WordPress 

Thanks everyone! Really appreciate the feedback. Looks like the primary recs are Wix, Wordpress, and Squarespace. I had a couple local friends who build sites recommend Sqspace.

Thanks!

I highly recommend wix. If you're fluent in indesign, like most of us design professionals are, it's super intuitive, even uses the same colour of guides and key commands -- basically just works like putting together an indesign document, with a growing selection of apps and add-ons. I use square space at work and find it really fussy and hard to customize - great if you just want to go with one of their templates and don't care about the details, as soon as you start adding custom CSS, very buggy. I also find a lot of their templates only look good with very polished full-bleed images, the templates fall apart very quickly as soon as you want to add any white space, or don't have a series of beautifully curated mono-chromatic images. 

I recommend Wix. As a person that have no experience in building a website, I made use of it to build a free website rather easily since all those tools inside are very handy.

This is my site for your reference:

http://thomascheestudio.wixsit...