The Megaphone Hosting

If you’re already a webmaster then you know that there are sites that sell most anything you can imagine to help you design and make your website function as you would like it to. However for every site that offers something for a fee, there is usually one that will offer the same thing or something similar for FREE. So which should you choose and how can someone do it for free?

Which to choose is solely up to the webmaster/site owner. A lot depends on the amount of funds you have to spend on your site and another consideration would be what type of visitors you are going to have. If your site is not going to be selling items, then many free solutions might work for you. If you are going to have a full blown shopping site however. you will most likely need to pay for the customized work for security purposes.

For the average person getting online, almost everything you’ll need once you have purchased your hosting can be found for free. From the programs you want to run like WordPress Blogs, Joomla CMS, Drupal, Message Forums, Bulletin Boards and much more, all have some type of free versions.

How can they do this? Many of them are open source. This means that the efforts of many people may have gone into the end product you use for free. They may be doing it for the love of writing php but most likely they are building something they hope to sell in the future for some big bucks to companies like Yahoo, MSN, or any number of the other big companies that are always looking for the next big thing on the internet.

There are many legitimate free download sites out there which can greatly help the beginning webmaster. For instance WordPress and Joomla have their own websites in which programmers and script writers place free templates and such on the official sites for download. They may also have a site of their own where they sell more customized versions or will build you one to suit your needs. The free versions are an “advertisement” for their work. Which is cool. They get their name out there to every visitor that comes to your site (usually their name is at the bottom of the template) and you get a quality template for free. There are many types of these offers on the internet.

A reminder. For every good php programmer out here that is creating good useful scripts you can use there are also the thieves and crooks trying to get you to download spyware, or worse. So anytime you opt for the “Free” version of anything on the internet keep in mind, “User Beware!”.