subject: Freelance Scripts - An Professional Review Of Paid, Custom And No Cost Scripts [print this page] If you need a script to run a business on the web, you will notice there are a few choices. One is to make or have a script custom designed. The second is to pay for a pre-made script. And the third is to locate a resource directory that provides free scripts to download.
Option 1: Custom Scripts
Designing your own script or having one made can be a good path to take when there is not a script currently available that does what you need it to. But it can be long and confusing process if you do not start out with some highly defined goals as well as coding experience. If you don't know coding yourself, most probably you end up at the mercy of the coder for any kind of future changes or protection issues. This can become a costly option.
Option 2: Free Scripts
Downloading a free script is another option for business owners. The price is right, so why not? Although free scripts are found everywhere and easy to setup and use, they have a handful of major problems.
Free scripts and free software downloads are among the strongest attractions to business owners wanting a shortcut. Unfortunately, they are also one of the greatest security risks.
Spammers use free scripts to their advantage cleverly to extract data out of your site. They can use emails captured from programs such as refer-a-friend to create lists and sell them to other spammers. This is a major violation of permission marketing and can result in major damage to your site from your server stopping your service for you hosting company deactivating your own email privileges. Not to mention exactly how your customer will really feel after having their loyalty and trust abused.
Many business owners have reported problems with a free script. The most common complains occur when the customer server gets broken into due to a security issue with the actual free script. Once the hackers are in the server they can steal valuable data, delete the sites or do anything they like with them. This causes a large amount of problems obviously and they unfortunately learned a hard and expensive lesson, that a free script is not always the best option.
Option 3: Paid Scripts
Buying a pre-made script is another option that many business owners take. They have decided how the cost for the script is worth more than their time and frustration of trying to develop it themselves. Examples of pre-made scripts range from the MySpace MSRS script or even the LayeredPanel free hosting panel script. These scripts save the site owners a lot of time and get their business up very quickly. So anyone who wants to setup a free website hosting site only needs a script with control panel features for example those found in Layered Panel.
After a business owner has bought these scripts, he or she will notice they come with rather generic and fundamental templates. Those templates are exactly the same design that many additional script users have therefore the best combination is to obtain a unique custom template (also called theme or skin) for your script to attract more customers. Complete custom designs are often around $300-400 for the whole process (the style, the coding and the integration towards the script). Another option is to buy a website skin or template that's been designed for that script. This isn't as unique as using a custom script but is also less money (usually under $100). If you are seriously interested in making money with your business, buying a script that's well designed with no security issues and having a custom design for your website is always worth it ultimately.
