Free Webspace?
It is incredible what you can get for "free" on the www. My cat has kindly agreed to be a "Guinea-Cat", testing some of the offers of free serverspace. Some of the "free" pages are paid for by different types of advertising, banners, pop-ups etc. Other sites appear to be without strings of any kind. They then may have some restrictions for use, ie. no FTP, upload of only one file at a time - some do appear to be both free of advertising and free of restrictions. I have to admit that I do not know how these sites are financed. Some sites advertise that all banners or all restrictions will be lifted, if you only pay a tiny little amount each month. It is thinkable that enough people are tempted by this to pay for the whole site.
Pesky Ads?
It is said:"there is no such thing as a free lunch", so of course it is no use to complain about banners and other forms of advertising. These are quite often irritating, though, since they put code on your page that is beyond your control. Firstly, this often means that the pages will not validate, secondly that your pages do not look the way they were intended, eg. some types of advertising prevent the use of framesets or make your framesets look very peculiar. Thirdly, there is a possible risk that some of the pop-ups or pop-unders could be harmful to the computers of people, who view the site. Of course, you should always have your computer well protected these days - updated antivirus program, firewall, maybe a popup stopper.
Workarounds
To deal with the problem of the peculiar looking framesets, I have designed some of the "Cat"-pages with tables. This is not to be recommended. Tables are for tabular data, not for layout. Although a page, designed with a table layout, may validate according to the standards of
the W3C it may still look peculiar in some of the "other" browsers
Netscape,
Firefox,
Opera, just to mention a few. Naturally, the cat will be most upset if he is not presented to his advantage so I am now exploring the possibilities of CSS (cascading style sheets) to see what they offer over framesets and tables.
Browse - At Your Peril
If you wish, you may explore some of the "Cat"-links to the left to see if any of the free websites might suit your needs.