A great name
Tripod unfortunately requires that you fork over personal information, including your name, state, zip code, birthday, and e-mail address, when you register for your site. The registration process is similar to Angelfire's, most likely because Lycos owns both services. By contrast, The Express Page doesn't require any personal information to sign you up. You may find, however, that it's worth submitting personal info, since Tripod delivers the most manageable URL of all four hosts: http://membername.tripod.com/.

Something for everyone
You don't have to know HTML to use Tripod's easy online site-building tool, Site Builder, which lets you either choose one of 50 predesigned site templates or start with a blank site. Tripod's templates are well designed, and you can choose from several styles, including My Personal Site or Small Business, for example. The type of template you choose dictates a few predetermined links. For example, if you choose My Vacation Album, your site will include Itinerary and Destination pages. Thankfully, you can add or delete any of these preset pages at any time. The Site Builder interface contains a preview of your site in the main frame and buttons (such as Add A Link and Add Text) that help you customize your page in the bottom frame. It's a breeze.

Of course, if you do know HTML, Tripod lets you take a more advanced route. Tripod's toolset actually extends far past Site Builder's capabilities. Its HTML editor, FreeForm, lets you edit code by hand; FileManager lets you quickly upload, move, or delete files from within your Web browser; and GIFWorks lets you edit images once you've uploaded them. Furthermore, Tripod is the only Web host to offer a script editor for even more advanced Web builders. Plus, each of these useful tools runs within your browser, as opposed to GeoCities' PageBuilder applet, which takes a few minutes to load.

Adding special effects
Tripod lets you snazz up your pages with several prebuilt scripts, including a page counter, driving directions, guestbook, and so on. Of course, Angelfire also offers many of these features, most of which you can also get through HTMLGear, a Lycos Network site that offers free site add-ons, usually through cutting and pasting code into your site. However, Tripod also offers its own Web Gems toolkit to add an MP3 search engine or extended weather forecast with satellite maps to your site, for example. It turns out that these extra tools are easier to add than Angelfire's add-ons. Only GeoCities comes close to offering as many unique special effects.

The cost of the free service
Like all free Web hosts, Tripod makes you display ads on your pages, but it lets you customize those ads like crazy. You can choose between an ad in a pop-up window and a standard banner ad. Even better, you can customize the banner with links, graphics, or skins, so you can, say, match the ad with your site theme. Tripod also offers the best online help pages of all the Web hosts we reviewed; you can display help in a frame while you're working so that you don't have to leave Site Builder to hunt down information. Tripod also offers support via e-mail and message boards, much like GeoCities.

GeoCities outshines Tripod only in its statistics reports. While GeoCities tallies your page hits, users' browser versions and screen resolution, and referring URLs, Tripod forks over only a page counter add-on.

Overall, we like both GeoCities and Tripod, but Tripod offers a user-friendly URL as well as easy-to-use tools for all skill levels--all reasons to turn to Tripod first.