Pros And Cons Of Getting A Free Website Template

[Flow]

Hi

I am considering a free website template from 3ix.org since I will probably host my site with them anyway. What are the pros and cons of doing so as opposed to say creating my own site with Frontpage?

Thanks

[cdnvic]

What kind of site will it be? A third option may be a content management system that will be easier to use, and make you less dependant on either your host, or Microsoft (who doesn't use Frontpage to design their own site).

A CMS is basicly an empty php site that you add content to and alot of the complicated stuff is left to the scripting of the system.

A few popular CMS sites:

http://source.mambo-foundation.org/

http://www.joomla.org/

http://www.geeklog.net/

There's other good free or low-cost options for online stores or classifieds as well.

[yeti]

Agree with cdnvic, a web content management system is the best way especially if your website needs to be frequently updated, as updates can be performed by people with a very limited knowledge of web programing.

http://www.opensourcecms.com/ allows you to try different CMS before installing the one you prefer, including CMS for blogs, e-business, forums, wiki and so on...

[Phil Conners]

Geeklog is practicaly dead and Mambo is a server killer - most hosting companies discourage or disallow it due to it's huge memory requirement (one site eats up over 256 MB RAM). Joomla seems to be the winner these days.

Don't know 3ix but would recommend shopping around. It's a buyers market and there are a lot of very competitive hosts around.

Sorry, was thinking of Zope/Plone, not Mambo...

[cdnvic]

Geeklog is practicaly dead and Mambo is a server killer - most hosting companies discourage or disallow it due to it's huge memory requirement (one site eats up over 256 MB RAM). Joomla seems to be the winner these days.

Don't know 3ix but would recommend shopping around. It's a buyers market and there are a lot of very competitive hosts around.

Geeklog is alive and well, with a new version just put out as a release candidate. Really not alot of difference between Joomla and Mambo. I've never had performance problems running either of them. If your host can't deal with them then move on to a host with more robust servers.

Regardless of the host, if you are using their proprietary template you don't have the option of telling them to get stuffed when they go down three times a week.

[Phil Conners]

I already corrected myself, i was thinking about Zope Anyway, it's not a matter of robust servers, but if you run a shared hosting computer with a standard 2 GB RAM and you get 100 clients each using Zope it's not rocket science to see that's not viable.

[El Taco Loco]

http://www.easybesthost.com sells ready made turnkey websites. It helps to know what you want to do with the site, as per other posters.

[The Coder]

http://www.easybesthost.com sells ready made turnkey websites. It helps to know what you want to do with the site, as per other posters.

Those hosting prices & packages look like they are stuck in a time warp from a decade ago, especially as it states "Who says hosting has to be expensive" -- say what? For *less* than their price you can get a whopping 1000x more bandwidth and 4000x more disk space from godaddy for instance. I wonder how someone could justify choosing these packages. Offering a mere crumb of disk space to users this day in age is hard to understand. Never ceases to amaze me that technology related things in Thailand is so expensive and often backwards in nature when it seems like it shouldn't have to be that way.

[Phil Conners]

I agree their plans seem a bit small, but if you consider sites offering gigabytes of disk space and unlimited bandwidth for a couple of bucks per months it also isn't rocket science that you're shopping in an all-you-can-eat buffet-shop. Nothing wrong with that, plenty of that type restaurants in Pattaya, but you got to understand you get what you pay for. Lek and Apex is not the same quality as, say, Brunos.

[cdnvic]

Prices and disk quotas aside, buying a turnkey website from a host means you are stuck with that host come what may. If you want to move hosting companies, you have to recreate the site from scratch. For a beginner Godaddy is probably a good choice for new users as it has alot of things like CMS's, galleries, blogs, databases, and chatrooms that install at the click of a button. After you get enough on the go, or you need more bandwidth you can migrate to either their, or someone elses dedicted servers with little of no fuss as the programs that install there are all open source stuff you can freely move anywhere.