TLDR: After considerable experimentation on alternatives, my choice is WordPress.org hosted at one of these sites.
The majority of scientists these days (including myself) are coding-literate, but don’t have any particular experience in developing websites. This makes tools that allow the creation of a nice website without directly writing .html, .css, etc. appealing, because it means that we don’t have to learn the details of these languages that we aren’t likely to be using outside of this context. In addition, we want to be focused on content, not maintenance.
For me, the following are the key prerequisites that a website builder should have:
- Easy to update/maintain.
- Reasonably easy to learn/use.
- Allows creation of a nice website with some flexibility in how it looks.
- Doesn’t require you to know complex .html, .css, etc.
- Cheap (or free, ideally).