Zoho Sites

Zoho Sites appears like a rather cheap service at first, seeing at the entry level package is free of charge. However, this package exists merely to allow you to play around with the admittedly easy to use site building tool that comes with it. The free package, above not allowing you to add photo galleries using their site builder, or even adding one using your own code as adding code isn’t allowed. It displays an advertisement at the bottom showing that your site was made for free, presumably to shame you into upgrading. However, even if you aren’t all that mindful of being perceived as unprofessional and just want to manage a small blog or a reference point type of site for people Googling your business to find your phone number and address on, something as simple as comment boxes are reserved for paying customers. Just to use your own domain name you need to be a monthly paying customer. Add to this that the free package only gives you 500 megabytes of storage for and 3GBs of bandwidth a month, I would much, much sooner recommend you take the time to figure your way around a service like Blogger from Google. Now while the paid packages aren’t as unusable as the free one. I’d argue they’re only better by a small margin. The problem is that the service is advertised as a means to save costs on hiring web designers and setup, but if you consider the unlimited bandwidth package comes at 15 dollars a month price tag, triple what you’d pay for similar hosting costs on the standard shared hosting service. You might very well end up paying more than you would for a service that offers Content Management System installations. The aspect of pricing I find most irritating is limiting things such the number of pages or photo galleries you can add to your site in addition to the storage and bandwidth restrictions. Ten photo galleries that use up 100 megabytes of storage don’t cost Zoho more than 3 galleries of the same size. The drag-and-drop site building tool is fairly intuitive and capable, allowing you to edit text fonts, change colors and move elements around seamlessly. It comes along with a comprehensive library of professionally looking templates that are all customizable to the point where if you spend even half an hour editing your site, I seriously doubt your final product would resemble any other made through the same service. However, expect to hit some customization options reserved for the higher tier package if you don’t go with the highest one.