Site building with Synthasite - a review

I've heard very recently about Synthasite, a free website builder, and I decided to check it out.
Created an account, and in a few steps I was setting up my first site. I was impressed....at first.
So let's see what all I got out of it.

Pros:

• very easy to set up a site, practicaly a 'for dummy' construction
• requires no technical skills
  
• it's free: web building, webhosting
• has easy to use templates that you can select from, not bad for freebies
• has a support (sort of) forum where you can ask your question and hopefully you'll be answered
• it's really easy to use - did I say how easy to use it is? :)
• it has a shopping cart - yes, you can sell your stuff online. The site uses Paypal for payment
• can create a site or a blog
  

Cons:

• NOT flexible. And I mean, at all. If you want to customize, for example, your heading, be it location on the page, or font size, color or anything else, forget it.
• cannot customize the templates. Some come with banners that you can replace with your own, some come with banners that you cannot replace with your own, and some don't have a banner at all.
• the bottom of the site has a link to the website, which is ok, but not with a tag of 'free personal site by...'. If you're selling jewelry and want to be viewed as a serious jewelry artist and business person, having a 'free personal website' is a no-no.
• cannot move the placement of the text and picture boxes (called 'widgets' like the blogger apps) on the page. They are fixed location. Quite unfriendly.
• and my biggest petpeeve as of now: when making your online shop, you cannot have more than 1 picture per product. Since your customer cannot see and touch the actual item, it is important to have a few good pictures of the same product from different angles, or some enlarged, so that they have a better idea of what they are getting online.

After struggling with a few templates to try to get them the way I want, I left it at that and returned to my current project, my osCommerce shopping cart site. I've spent already enough time with osCommerce to sort of know where I am with it, how can I tweak it, even how to add multiple pictures per product (by default it doesn't allow you that either, you need to install some modules, called 'contributions'), so I've decided I will continue with it.

I didn't find my evening of playing around with Syntasite to be a failure. Don't get me wrong, it is a lovely place to build your generic site. It's great if you want to have a site with your online portfolio, to display your jewelry (you can add multiple pictures on a page, you can only not add multiple pics on the pages for your shop), and some of the layouts are quite good. For example, a colleague of mine created a personal site with info about a particular group of folks, and on the side of her page she added affiliate products that one can purchase. Passive income. That works too.

Having said all that, of course, another alternative you have, is once your site is done, to download it (which you have to do anyway if you host it someplace else), then tweak your html, php and css files, and then upload to your host. If you're good with these, then go ahead and tweak to your heart's content. But then why did you want to use the 'dummies' tool in the first place?