I know, I hate Ancestry.com/Genealogy.com for that reason. I only use their services to ask about names or advertise my research in forums.

There's some free ancestry software out there - I think most of it is windows-based though.

Personal Ancestral File is what I started off with, and it allowed me to make simple HTML pages.
http://www.familysearch.org/eng/paf/

This is a bit dated and the photos need to be updated, but an example of what you can do on the web with Personal Ancestral File is at:
http://www.stephsfamily.com/PAF/Milne/

There's also Legacy 6.0 Family Tree (but I've not tried it)
http://www.legacyfamilytree.com/Download.asp

I'm on a Mac now, so I'll be looking for free ancestry software again when I have time.
http://genealogy.about.com/od/software_mac/

In the meantime, any research I've been doing has just been updated via my shell acct in vi, heh...