sites.google is easy for beginners but I dont recall much control over
> the appearance of the whole thing.
I have a site under sites.google and you can get at the definitions of most things from body text to each if the headings, set colours and background images, reasonable control of layout, etc. But I did use the most basic template, maybe other templates stop you fiddling too much.
Reluctant to use google, as it's google... It does produce sites that work though, even without javascript enabled in your browser.