Free website development: pros and cons

Small business organizations often try to save money that is why they prefer to develop websites themselves and do not use the services of web studios. Let us try to investigate all nuances of free website development.

Choice of a free content management system

You can find a lot of free content management systems on the Internet. These are special scripts which permit you to manage your site on your own. User does not necessarily have to possess programming skills or knowledge of HTML to publish an article or add an image on his site. Besides a lot of CMS already have initial components and templates which can make the beginner's life easier. But you should understand that you need solid enough knowledge to adjust and optimize the functional of any CMS.

Free site design. Templates

The most widespread way to get a free ready-made web design is to use a free site template. Usually you can find professional and amateur free templates on topical sites. It is important to know that a free template that you have downloaded is likely to be tied to one CMS only, and some templates will work only with a certain version of CMS. As far as subject area of free templates is concerned it is the same as that of paid analogues: business, science, entertainment, tourism, abstract themes etc. The use of free ready-made templates has several advantages: the speed of development of your own website increases, customizability of the template permits to change its elements to reach bigger individuality, and, finally, free templates permit to evaluate several variants of design and choose the best of them without any material costs.

Site template is just a work piece, visual decoration. You can use a template without changing its structure or you can change graphical elements, style sheets and block arrangement. But any changes made by beginners usually affect html layout negatively causing indignation among advanced clients of the firm. Uniqueness of design is not only changing background and adding a logo - it is a totally unique interface which is optimized for certain tasks of the site.

Free hosting

It is not an easy task to find a good free hosting that maintains PHP and MySQL. Most of the hosters who provide high-quality free hosting are western companies. That is why for registration and getting technical support you will have to know English. In 90% cases hosting is provided on the basis of various UNIX systems in conjunction with web server Apache. The work with Apache is considerably different from the work with IIS server on the basis of Windows. If a hoster does not have a hosting control panel you will have to know UNIX commands and .htaccess directive.

Technical requirements of content management systems to the hosting are strict enough that is why as a result you get a very slow site on a free hosting.

Free domain

In most cases in the process of registration of a free hosting account you will be offered to enter the name of a free third-level domain or connect an already existing domain. A piece of advice from personal experience - do not try to save money on the domain. The longer the domain name is the fewer visitors will trust you. It is harder to enter such name into the browser address bar and more difficult to remember it. As a result you will either be disappointed in your business or will buy a domain of a higher level and lose rating (PR, Yandex topical citation index, back links) of the old one.

Free components and modules

After choice of the content management system, installation of the template, choice of the hosting and domain you must solve the problem of filling the site with content. In some time (when the first visitors come to you) you will certainly want to know their opinion about your site, see the comments to the materials or discuss a certain topic on the forum. For these purposes there are a lot of paid and free components and modules. If you have enough knowledge in the field of html, css, php, mysql you will certainly be able to organize their secure interaction on the site. If not — it is better to entrust professionals with this task.

Development of a free website is possible! But if you do not want to spend long hours surfing the Internet, study the nuances of components adjustment, if you do not want to choose and optimize the template yourself, if you are already disappointed in free hosting with disturbing advertising, if you are not patient enough to study UNIX, if you are thinking of promotion of your site into the TOP of search results page and a third-level domain is not for you, if you want to save time, forces and nerves — address the specialists of web design studio WebStudio2U. You can order a site right now!