Hey ... it really depends on what you want/need. Its always a factor of time and money ... its you have tons of time and little money then some solutions are better than others. If you have money but not a lot of time then there are other solutions.

The three big players in web development (unless your going ecommerce) are wordpress, joomla, and drupal ... probably in that order.

We offer web development and 100% of out sites are coded in wordpress. Its extremely search engine friendly and comes with a TON of "free" plugins that make your wordpress site dynamic and relevant.

If your looking for a more "wysiwyg" website you could try other solutions as well.

In my opinion you get what you pay for ... your generally not going to have a super high conversion rate with a run-of-the-mill site. It doesnt need to be anything spectacular (keep it simple) but it needs to be designed with conversion in mind.

I just use Dreamweaver and a local Xampp install - with WordPress running

There are several different platforms and builders you can use. I myself prefer WordPress. I have dabbled in Joomla but Wordpress does all I need.

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Wordpress is pretty much the standard at this point. If you can learn how to develop your own templates it can be pretty powerful.

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Wordpress for me is the way to go.....a lot easier than using dreamweaver which is what I used to do and once you know how to make your own wordpress templates, creating sites is a breeze....

If you are not comfortable with programming design etc,. wordpress is best as it has the best interface to create and update the site.

You can use joomla, drupal, xcart, zen-cart

What type of website? An ecommerce store? An affiliate website? The type of software to use is dependent on what type of sites you are wanting to build?

You can use Joomla open sources also as word press is also good.

Wordpress is certainly the way to go. However, I sometimes use Dreamweaver too.