Our team's website works well enough but it's just a series of standard html pages. I'd like to get a bit more up to date to allow more functionality (eg secure areas and so on) so am looking for a free website builder.

So, suggestions please and what are the advantages (for use on Windows)

(Would have forum searched but the search doesn't seem to work well enough atm to find what I want despite knowing that it has been discussed previously)

not free, but a copy of serif webplus x2 or earlier can be had on ebay for very little. super easy to use.

Something like wordpress might be worth a look if you're semi web tech competent…

Not sure how you'd turn a wordpress template into something a bit more distinctive and well, LVIS…

What is your level of ability?

Depends on competancy – textedit for the fully fledged geek

Well I work in IT and have decent coding skills in other languages so I reckon I should be able to cope.

As you say though, whatever I use needs to be customisable enough to make it look right.

Drupal

+1 for Drupal. easy to use straight out the box, but you can do loads with it once you're a bit more confident

That sounds promising

clubber, its php, so any exerience of C or server side scripting and you'll be fine. as far as I know its the only off the peg CMS that is used in massive websites, universal and sony to name two.

Sadly no experiece of those but I'm sure I'll be able to pick up what I need

I use Modx, it's very good but support is flaky and learning curve can be a little steep as a result. I use it for everything now as it's our CMS of choice at work – it would make little sense learning something else now.

If you can code html and css, wordpress, drupal, joomla should all be fully customisable without too much effort.