Hi can anyone please help me with what are the best (free preferably and easy/quick to use) programs for designing floor plans. I need to design 1. an indoor floor plan with an outdoor courtyard attached as well as 2. a complete outdoor field type plan for a very pretentious client wanting detailed plans for their wedding set up!
Any help would be amazing thank you!
Microsoft Visio is designed for this sort of thing. It isn’t free, though (I’m not sure if it is included in some versions of Office or not) - and there’s a hefty learning curve.
A quick Google search turned up a number of online options, including this one, which seems to be made by Autodesk, who are a big name in this sort of thing. Has to be worth a try, since it seems to be free. 
Have you looked at Google Sketch up? I’ve no played with it much or lately, but it might do it.
Draft Sight is a free 2d cad system completely compatible with autocad.
Works great for floorplans and elevations.
I don’t think I tried the two programs above, but when doing up floor and site plans for my permits last year I used Sketchup.
Sketchup is really a 3D modelling suite and is extremely versatile, though with various architectural features. It can be used for floor plans and there are lots of community created packages for architectural drawing, but nothing that makes for a specialized floorplan tool.
I use it occasionally for drawing up built-ins and project visualizations. Last year when we bought an old house and remodeled it I was on a tight sched and I couldn’t get a draftsperson. After I couldn’t find any free/affordable floorplan suites that could produce what I needed, I did all my city drawings with sketchup.
Sketchup does the job well, but you are going to have to do everything from scratch with it. If I could have found something serious but specific to floorplans in the short time I had I would have used it instead.
If you aren’t familiar with those aforementioned softwares, I might recommend Powerpoint. It is quite easy to set a scale and draw shapes to the correct size- it is also possible to use real images for some features as well as to easily replicate things like tables.
It isn’t very technical and won’t do 3D, but it will get the job done without too much work. And it is easy to adjust in real time with your client if needed. I recommend using metric to ease the scaling.